Author Reverend Doshin Kusan 3 May 2024
Exploring the conscious mind and using experiences in our daily lives with the author’s own experiences and mistakes.
This quote is from Joko Beck, a Zen teacher with The Ordinary Mind Zen. Joko died in 2011. This is an idea about Zen:
“ Caught in the self-centred dream: only suffering :
Holding to self-centred thoughts: exactly the dream;
Each moment, life as it is: the only teacher :
Being just this moment: compassion’s way”.
( Joko Beck, Zen teacher. )
This modern Zen Buddhism verse captures the nature of the conscious mind. This verse emphasizes that we need to go into our inward knowing to truly learn. In many ways, Zen is a process that needs the practitioner to go inward to find their awakening.
“The Song of Zazen” is another Zen chant, that also highlights and suggests that you need to understand how you become blocked by your usual conscious way of being in the world. Zen prepares us and shows us how we can escape.
“How sad that people ignore the near
And search for truth afar:
like someone in the midst of water.
Crying out in thirst
Like a child of a wealthy home.
Wandering among the poor.
Lost on dark paths of ignorance:
We wander through the six worlds :
From dark path to dark path, we wander
When shall we be freed, from birth and death?”
(Hakuin Zenji)
These two chants are good examples of the ideal Zen process to open up your own closed way of being. It seems that Western people use much learning from the outside. The rhythm of movement from outer to inner and back again is forgotten in Western society. Perhaps there is a deep process that keeps many people lost in the phenomenal world. Zen can balance the way of learning by making a pathway to finding emptiness, compassion, and wisdom.
There needs a dedicated understanding of meditation to balance our outside learning with our inside learning. Much of what I will explain comes from my own experience. Strangely: I will begin this article by explaining my beginning of meditation by dabbling in karate training in the early 1970s.
I began to love Karate and training and attended 2 times a week for 2 hours a day. I tended to have many injuries: a broken nose, opened bloody eyes, damaged legs, and a dislocated leg. During my ‘build-up’ to my black belt grading I started to do 7 days a week 4 hours of training. I also trained at home 7 days a week doing 350 bare-knuckle press-ups and 600 sit-ups before I went to work. I became engrossed with my training. Somehow, I got to work on time. You may have guessed that I was never a great karateka. My practice somehow seemed to be changing how I saw the world.
One vivid moment I remember, was when I seemed to have very clear perceptions and experiences during each moment. I started to have strong experiences of connectedness. I would like to explore some of these experiences that I had in my early days of Karata and Zen training. One day while running through the grass at Centennial Park in Sydney I looked back and found I had left my footprints in the grass. I had a sudden feeling of really belonging and understanding my place in the universe. The symbol of the footprints seemed to calm me and made me very peaceful.
I remember much later in Zen training that I had similar experiences. When I did a long 21-day Zazen by myself, I felt a strong feeling of loneliness and a feeling of dying. I wanted to escape the retreat. I started to do long meditations, walking and running, and doing 15-18 hours of meditation a day of Zen. I stayed with my Zen practice and started to understand suffering and happiness. Yes, I was lonely and frightened of dying but these feelings subsided during the 21-day solo retreat. I think I was one of the lucky people who could manage heightened periods of pain. I handle Zen sitting very well. Our Zen group became known as Soldier Zen. Members of that Zen group still laugh at the name when we get together.
My meditation came when I started to do Transcendental Meditation and then I discovered Zen Buddhism. The two main Zen types are Soto and Rinzai. Soto encourages meditation and Rinzai encourages Koan practice. A koan is a non-intellectual difficult question. The idea is to help people live with the understanding of emptiness. You are then able to understand how you become caught in the phenomenal world.
Soto Zen has “Just Sitting ” which helps students meditate and learn how to do the more complicated “Silent illumination”. Silent Illumination is a style of meditation that has been developed in China and It has become popular as a Buddhist Zen practice. Silent Illumination allows the student to just sit and allow meditation to gently emerge, and for them to experience the process of knowing themselves. This style of learning suits the Soto School of Zen.
Silent Illumination works well in a sangha situation where students are meditating together. There is less need to take students to Dokusan (interview) and away from the sangha: and less disturbance for students. Senge (1992) suggests a learning community is a place where people continue learning together. A sangha is a Buddhist place for learning in a group. Silent illumination helps students discover and create their reality.
However, these processes require that people fully understand how enculturation and socialization inhibit their experiences. For some lucky people who have insight, learning is easy, but for most learning is always difficult.
Often individuals hold inconsistent values because their values are held back in awareness. Neville (1992) suggests that socialization and enculturation depend on subconscious processing. Scott-Peck (1993) suggests that consciousness sometimes can be so painful that people anesthetize themselves, and he goes on to say people are prevented from moving forward to self-knowing. Piaget (1962 ) suggests that people are absorbed in the ego and the external world. Another author, Bawden (1994) suggests that they are attempting to bring light from the dark. Silent illumination is achieving knowledge of form and emptiness. Zen has meaning because it allows inner learning to bring forth a deeper understanding of compassion and wisdom.
Neville (1989) believes we are trapped in a trance-like state. And that all our habitual behavior, body movements, narrow focus, beliefs, and realities are all induced by our cultures. Zen is a way out of our cultures. Silent illumination practiced by Soto Zen Buddhist students is one way of helping students escape from this trance.
Neville (1989) suggests a zen-like process of self-observation and paying attention to everything in the world and everything in yourself. Self-remembering is a diligent expansion of consciousness to be able to keep the whole of your being in awareness. This is very much like the Ideas of Sheng-Yen and Guo Gu (2021) Silent Illumination. Much of Soto Zen school uses self-observing and paying attention to everything in your world and everything in yourself. “The Great Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra”, suggests that when we see clearly, all our entanglements are from the phenomenal world and are the reasons for our suffering.
Many people begin Zen practice to find a way out of suffering, and there are many other reasons for meditation. I am only working with the idea of suffering and pain. People look at how to work with pain and suffering and try to find a liveable level of comfort. Levine (1987 ) summarises this koan as “Should I live or should I die”. A koan is a conundrum, outside of intellectual understanding, or a device used in Zen to explore the mind and clear the heart. He suggests and describes a koan as a way of entering the moment. I sense that many people use conditioning to prevent them from experiencing the pain of this moment. Zen can bring about a reality that has been hidden for years and years.
The reason for doing Zen is to improve our lives and to improve people who become part of a sangha and learn to be compassionate and caring. Quality of life is not about our standards of living. Perhaps the quality of life is not constrained by logic.
“Meares (1988) writes :
Quality of life.
Has no purpose
Because its being
is beyond where purpose lives
Quality of Life
Is like the dew
It comes unseen
And brings a blessing
To those on whom it falls
Quality of life
is the essence of being
Like the wind
It cannot be seen
Only the effects of it.”
Quality of life does not come from our material being but comes from the very opposite. It comes from our awareness of our humanity. The purpose of Zen is to free our minds from the contradiction of logic. To let the mind go beyond what is normally considered to be sensible. Freedom to experience more. Meares (1988) advocates a simple meditation not too different from Soto Zen. This is a Meditation to enhance our life. Quality of life is when the flow of life is enhanced when we let Zen Buddhist meditation into our lives.
Meares(1988) talks about the qualities that spring from love, compassion, and acceptance of others and ourselves. There is something of a non-forcing in meditation. You can describe it as “Just sitting”. Just sitting Is very common in the Soto school of Zen Buddhism. Neville (1989 ) describes this process as no force, no striving, no contemplation, or any way of concentrating on the breath. I was introduced to a simple Navajo Chant by Professor (Bird) in 1994 at my university which helped me drop my enculturation and shadows,
Yet The Navajo Chant is beyond the shadow.
“The mountains. I become part of it.
The herb, the fir tree, I become part of it.
The morning mists, the clouds, the gathering water,
I become part of it
The wilderness, the dewdrops, the pollen
I become part of it”
(Bird)1994
This strong personal need to learn a new quality of life can be found in Zen Buddhism. The Great Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra points to how Zen students should understand and be transformed by deep suffering. We can see the emptiness when we are open to others and shift from seeing ourselves to seeing others. We begin to see the whole quest for perfect wisdom and transcend birth and death. Then we see there is no self apart from the interplay of reality. There is no old age and death.
REFERENCESBowden, R.1994
Beck, J.C
Benzwie, T. 1987
Bird, G. 1994
Boulton, D. 1992
Caine, R.N. and Caine, G. 1991
Egger, G. 1981
Gardner, H. 1985
Guo Go 2021
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Kolb, D. 1984
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Laughlin, C.D. Jr, 1990
Levine, S. 1979 and 1987
Levev, J. 1987
Lidell, L. 1987
Maturana, H. R. 1987
Meares, A. 1988
Neville, B. 1989
Piaget 1962
Senge 1992
Scott-Peck 1993
Sheng-Yen 2021
The Great Prajna Paramita Heart Sutra