I go out several times a day to play ball with the dog. It keeps him exercised and theoretically more calm and it’s one of the little rituals
that I attend to that form the container of my life. There have been several times in the past few days where I’ve engaged that ritual and found myself looking up at the clouds and watching a solitary bird gliding around on thermals just being a bird. That was not the interesting part, however. The interesting part is that there was no thought of “bird” or “clouds” or “thermals”, I just used those words because that’s what this format is about. The experience was just that, a pure experience. No concepts. No labels. I looked up and my eyes took in birdglidingontheramalscloudsasbackground as a total experience of eyes doing what eyes do while bird does what birds do and clouds do what clouds do. There was no sense of being separate from those things either. Shane was as much birdglidingontheramalscloudsasbackground as birdglidingontheramalscloudsasbackground was Shane in that moment.
The same thing has been happening on the cushion. When I look into the wall, the wall is looking into me. Sound familiar? “…when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” … Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the Zen picture of the donkey staring into the well and the well staring into the donkey? There are times when boundaries of self and other fall away and they seem to be falling away more commonly for me lately.
It occurred to me during one of these times to go back to Genjokoan and pick up stanza five which is where I left off many months ago because it just eluded me, but this time around it seemed pretty plain. Makes me think Genjokoan could be translated as “you better get your meditation on before you pick this shit up, kid”.
Anyway, stanza five is currently speaking to me as an expression of walking the world minus concepts. More practice may have me see it differently later, but at least it isn’t totally puzzling me anymore. Here it is as translated by Shohaku Okumura in the fabulous book Realizing Genjokoan.
When buddhas are truly buddhas they don’t need to perceive they are buddhas; however, they are enlightened buddhas and they continue actualizing Buddha. In seeing color and hearing sound with body and mind, although we perceive them intimately, [the perception] is not like reflections in a mirror or the moon in water. When one side is illuminated, the other is dark.
Chew on that shit. It’s made my brain hurt for months.
If there is anyone out there who studies Genjokoan, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this stanza as well in comments.
As for the picture, it came up in WordPress’s media gallery based on words I used in this post and frankly it was just too damn funny not to use. Go Nietzsche go!
Please remember that no matter what stories you tell yourself or agree to believe, they are still just stories we all made up and agreed upon. Whether they are Buddha stories, Jesus stories, Gaia stories, what a good person is stories, what a bad person is stories…they are all just stories.
I strongly suspect that once we die and go back to the ocean of energy we came from we are going to see that we had it all wrong anyway and the stories were just stuff we made up trying to make sense of what some folks saw as they looked into the infinite through a grimy window.
Whatever your story, if it’s not one that brings peace of mind and compassion for yourself and others, use today and this weekend to look into some new stories.
After my 100 days of practice, I just coasted and waited to see what was up. Practiced slacked off to way less than daily sitting and I found that my regular brain habits drifted on back in. I slowly started yelling at stupid drivers and I honked the horn a couple times. I got irritated more easily at my usual life frustrations. You know…that old chestnut. Then changes at work caused me to get really off kilter because they weren’t changes I was happy with and of course how I feel should rule the universe. Fuck…back to the cushion in a hurry.
It wasn’t quite that dramatic, but I’m a queen, I gotta dress things up at times.
The cushion welcomed me back without question. This time I got back to the sweet spot pretty quickly. Only it wasn’t sweet, it just was and just is. Practice has lost it’s ‘wow’ factor and is a lot more organic, embodied, and natural. I’m finding that life on the cushion and walking around life are losing any significant lines of demarcation. Cushion time is a lot like breathing air in walking around life when I detach from the stories I make up about how they should be different worlds.
That’s kinda cool right? Sounds like movement in the direction I’d hoped for anyway. Well bruddah’s and sistah’s, I’m not findin’ it to necessarily be a ride on a gravy train with biscuit wheels. Changing the fundamental way I’ve gotten thru existence for nigh on 42 years is a tad bit disorienting. It led me to wonder if I was born into Gen WTF from last post. The world as I know it is not organized on non dual principles. It’s the non dual experience that informs me how to live in the world. My knee jerk reaction was to try and figure out what’s wrong with the world when what’s probably more accurate is to figure out how to live in the world with a clean set of lenses to perceive it with. The experience of this, however, feels like riding the tilt-a-whirl at the county fair while the ride is hanging suspended over a bottomless abyss. Yeah, it kinda feels crappy.
I heard a phrase from a podcast on Buddhist Geeks in which the interviewee described this as Existential Vertigo. Isn’t that the coolest phrase? I love it. It really hit the nail on the head. (I listened to a ton of BG podcasts yesterday trying to catch up so I can’t remember which one this was in, but if I do, I’ll post an edit later)
I also wrote to my zen mentor trying to describe all this swirl of gobbeldy gook in my head. He advised that the experience of Buddha Dharma can initially be disorienting but Buddha Dharma itself is not disoriented. That really helped to settle me down. The short version of this story is ‘trust the process’. (ok, in my head it sounds like ‘trust the process, bitch. ain’t nuthin new here. you just explorin and rememberin, you ain’t discoverin’)
So I’m back to my empty chair image in meditation today and I flashed onto the real deal. So if you want the short version of what I’ve just described above in visual form, here ya go…these three photos are identical.
This is my first book review in a while on a book that I bought for myself and was not sent to my by a publisher. I knew from the first time I saw the title I was probably going to like this book. My only trepidation at first was when I saw it was by a Tibetan author who had written some fairly dense works in the past (Mind Beyond Death, Penetrating Wisdom, etc). I really don’t have an affinity for Tibetan Buddhism because I have a difficult time relating to its inherent cultural garb and it’s frequent mystical bent. Those things are great but they just don’t work for me.
Rebel Buddha is the most recent work by Dzogchen Ponlop in which he tackles traditional Buddhist teachings without using any standard cultural references and very little typical Buddhist lingo. In fact, he makes an ongoing argument that to survive in a viable future oriented way, the path will have to drop its cultural trappings to fully flower into the universal philosophy that it is.
In his intro he sets up a couple themes he follows throughout the book. One is the difference between Dharma and drama and second that the Buddhist path is about freedom thru combining wisdom and compassion. “When our thoughts and actions are dictated by powerful pressures from unreasonable social, religious, or cultural values, we can become stuck in a joyless place where we know nothing but suffering and further bondage. True wisdom is free of the dramas of culture or religion and should bring us only a sense of peace and happiness.”
Now, his writing is not culture free by any means. It is steeped in Western metaphor and reference, directed at a Western audience. This is a third theme he works on as he explores time and again how Buddhism will survive and thrive in the West. Ponlop lives in America now and even dedicates to book to his nephew who is American born.
The rebel of Rebel Buddha is the person who is looking beyond what he is given, beyond given labels of what is an is not important and valued in our culture, beyond religion and what we are told is spiritually valuable and virtuous, beyond the structures of what all these ideas have created in your own head. Buddha himself was the ultimate rebel, stepping outside all of his boundaries in an effort to find the truth.
This entire book was a great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it and hope he continues on this type of writing. Here is a little video where he discusses the core of the book’s theme that developed out of the journey of Siddhartha.
To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by everything – Dogen
so…Buddha nature can be anything anywhere at anytime
My cat Ruby found this out recently when Tricksy Buddha snuck up on her while she was sleeping.
It looked like he might be trying to be mischievous or on the road to some havoc. I think sometimes life does appear threatening that way. When what’s really happening is Tricksy Buddha is trying to give a good belly rub.
That Old Guy, Dogen is often quoted as saying “To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by everything”. I’ve come to understand this to mean that when you teacup is empty, you can put anything in it (Miss Queer Divine Dissatisfaction gave a recent example of the teacup filled with shit and grumpy drag queens). This also means that you can find Dharma and Buddha everywhere if you look…well if you look by not looking or with eyes that do not see or some cryptic Zen shit.
Anyway, the point is, I was out on the front porch this morning and I’ll be damned if I didn’t find Buddha right under my sage bushes.
