Organic Brain Gardening
Lately my brain has been in a process of reorganizing itself. It’s partially conscious and partially not. I sort of knew it was going on but it got really clear the past couple of days when I started spontaneously cleaning and organizing stuff around the house. That’s always a big sign that my brain is also working on something deeper: throwing shit out, cleaning what’s there, looking at things and asking “is this necessary?”. I have no idea what all the movement is about, but that’s not important. I actually like how this process works in me.
Living life organically without too much structure, rules, or preconceived notion has always felt like the way it’s supposed to happen. For myself, life is happening best when it’s unfolding like a flowering plant. My life is happening at its worst when there’s too much marching in step with rules, ideas, and plans. It’s not totally that flowing. There is planning and execution but I’m happiest when it’s more like a river and less like a battle march.
Breathing in this atmosphere, I felt drawn back to a passage in Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching that has resonated with me from the first time I read it years ago. I dug out my tired old book (yes an actual paper book) now with yellowed and dog eared pages to read that passage over a few times yet again. It always seems to sink deeper each time and curiously it has echoes to the section of Genjokoan that will be in my next post on that book.
Anyway, I know I’ve quoted this TNH passage before but I’m going to do it again both for you and for me.
We enter the path of practice through the door of knowledge, perhaps from a Dharma talk or a book. We continue along the path, and our suffering lessens, little by little. But at some point, all of our concepts and ideas must yield to our actual experience. Words and ideas are only useful if they are put into practice. When we stop discussing things and begin to realize the teachings in our own life, a moment comes when we realize that our life is the path, and we no longer rely merely on the forms of practice. Our action becomes “non-action,” and our practice becomes “non-practice.” The boundary has been crossed, and our practice cannot be set back. We do not have to transcend the “world of dust” (saha) in order to go to some dust-free world called nirvana. Suffering and nirvana are of the same substance. If we throw away the world of dust, we will have no nirvana.
Realizing Genjokoan pt 2
And so finally back to Genjokoan. I got side tracked by many of life’s irons in the fire, but I never forget about my on going review of Realizing Genjokoan.
In this post, I’m looking at the first 3 lines as translated by Shohaku Okumura. They are dense and on first blush seem to be contradictory. In Okumura’s analysis, he breaks it down like this: The first sentence is from the perspective of Buddha’s original teachings. Sentence two is written from the Mahayana perspective of the Heart Sutra and non dual thought while the last sentence is written from Dogen’s personal teaching perspective. The bulk of the chapter goes into looking more deeply into these 3 points of view.
These are the first three sentences in the translation:
1) When all dharmas are the Buddha Dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, life and death, buddhas and living beings
2) When the ten thousand dharmas are without [fixed] self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no living beings, no birth and no death.
3) Since the Buddha Way by nature goes beyond [the dichotomy of] abundance and deficiency, there is arising and perishing, delusion and realization, living beings and buddhas.
My thoughts on these sentences are that they seem to be a blow to the head to shake me out of my constructed or as some would say conditioned reality. What at first seems dissonant…there are or there are not delusions? There are or there are not living beings? There is or there is not death?…when taken as a gestalt are actually summed up as a clear message. All of these things are simultaneously true and descriptive of reality. Nirvana is Samsara is Nirvana…but not in a fixed manner. Okumura explores existence as a river which exists as a myriad of conditions, and as we’ve been told, you can never step in the same river twice. Trying to deny this simultaneous reality will keep me stuck in it.
“From the perspective of prajna (wisdom), if we think there are fixed places or conditions called ‘samsara,’ ‘nirvana,’ ‘delusion,’ and ‘enlightenment,’ our practice becomes merely an attempt to escape from what we think is undesireable” p. 40.
As Thich Nhat Hanh would say…the rose is in the garbage and the garbage is in the rose.
Day 98 of 100 – Genjo what?
Over the years I have been a spiritual vagabond, I’ve had this unspoken feeling in me that as a human, I am the perfect intersection of spirit and matter. I don’t think I would have ever put that into those exact words until recently, but that is the gist of how I felt. Maybe ‘spirit’ would be more like whatever I could not see or understand. It didn’t matter what I didn’t know about it, it was very much present and not in some obtuse way, but like something in my cells or dna. I can feel it, I just don’t know how the equation works to unlock it…yet.
There has been something about Zen that seems to address this for me in an unspoken way. That’s probably why I was so drawn to Zen as opposed to anything else, because it got me at that non-verbal level in my bones.
In what I’ve studied up to now (in books, not zazen) this idea has mainly been hinted at like words swirling around a black hole in space. A thing only discovered by the effect it has on other things.
Ok, so I told ya that to tell ya this:
Recently my Zentor recommended a book to me…Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura. It is a study of this pithy bit of Dogen’s work and I’m finding it quite awesome (and I’m only on page 38). 
It’s got the feel of one of those kinds of books you read many time and study…some of the pages are getting weak from the amount of highlight ink I’m putting on them.
The reason I’m mentioning it now as opposed to just doing a single review is because early on, he hit the nail on the head regarding my spirit/matter thing I talked about above. Okumura starts the book off by analyzing the kanji Dogen used to write the title, Genjokoan, with. Apparently Doggie Diddles made very particular choices in the characters he used and they were not the everyday choices, either.
Anyhoot, I normally find this kind of analysis quite boring as shit, but Okumura actually held my interest. He works the word koan down to a definition based on the particular kanji Dogen uses and this is where the quote comes in that this post is centered around.
…the word koan expresses the reality of our own lives; we are the intersection of equality (universality, unity, oneness of all beings) and inequality (difference, uniqueness, particularity, individuality). Reality, or emptiness, includes both unity and difference. –Shohaku Okumura
This struck me as significantly as when I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of the Heart Sutra form/emptiness phrase as “wave is water, water is wave…” The two quotes really help me validate what feels like one of the squishier bits of the Buddhist teachings and that’s Dirty Dharma, baby.
I’m nowhere near done with this book. In fact, I’ve only scratched the surface, but I already have to recommend it. Put your paws on it if you can.
Day 13 of 100
Wow it’s a been a busy week and a half. I started to think there were a couple nights where I was just too tired to get to the cushion, but I got there anyway. So far I’m maintaining the routine of two times a day at 25 minutes each. My head space is pretty clear and I’m getting to the point again where when I’m meditating it feels less like a body/mind meditating and more like just a mind-thing emanating awareness.
That sounds all pretty cool, but at some point along the journey (beyond just this 100 day thing), the coolness/exciting/ooo-ahh factor faded away so now it’s more just watching what happens as it happens. It leads me to think more and more that the word ‘mindful practice’ is much more appropriate and accurate than ‘spiritual practice’.
When I think of spiritual I think of looking for metaphysical evidence and answers. However when I think of being mindful I think more of what’s happening for me now which is to exercise bare awareness. Both practices are looking towards life mystery but spiritual practice to me feels more mystical while mindfulness practice feels more grounded. They are just two facets of the gem, but mindfulness feels more about me and where I’m at with it all today. That’s how this blog started anyway, with my phrase “mindfulness is the muscle, meditation is the gym”. So I feel like I’m anchored in my basic theme.
By no means do I have a plan or any answers to it all…I’m just being mindful of what arises and letting me and my practice organically grow.
I am ending this post with a quote from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings which for me describes my own organic journey. I find myself cracking the book open to this dog eared page all the time because it keeps reminding me of what I most need to know.
We enter the path of practice through the door of knowledge, perhaps from a Dharma talk or a book. We continue along the path, and our suffering lessens, little by little. But at some point, all our concepts and ideas must yield to our actual experience. Words and ideas are only useful if they are put into practice. When we stop discussing things and begin to realize the teachings in our own life, a moment comes when we realized that our life is the path, and we no longer rely merely on the forms of practice. Our action becomes “non-action,” and our practice becomes “non-practice.” The boundary has been crossed, and our practice cannot be set back. We do not have to transcend the “world of dust” (saha) in order to go to some dust-free world called nirvana. Suffering and nirvana are of the same substance. If we throw away the world of dust, we will have no nirvana.
A random mindfulness bell
I’ve read several times that in PlumVillage, Thich Nhat Hanh’s sangha in France, that they have a random bell that is rung throughout the day. When it rings everyone stops what they are doing and take 3 mindful breaths. I thought that sounded like a simple but really cool daily practice, but I could not randomly ring a bell and have it be actually random, so I googled “random mindfulness bell” or some such and got a hit for a program that I now have on my computer. It runs in the back ground and randomly throughout the day it rings. If I’m not on a work call, I stop what I’m doing, take 3 mindful breaths and continue on. It’s remarkable how settling and grounding it can be. It’s like a little re-set button. Being a student of Dirty Dharma, I always find it most interesting when I find the bell irritates me and I then have aggravation to cool down during my breathing.
here’s the link: http://www.mindfulnessdc.org/mindfulclock.html
