|
|
TRACTORS AND SQUIRRELS EXPOUNDING DHARMA
BY SHORYU BRADLEY
reposted from Ancient Way Journal,
originally published March 1, 2017
To Study Buddhism Is to Study the Self
When my dharma sister asked me to contribute a piece to Ancient Way, I began thinking of what I might offer. What would be a fundamental point I could send “out there” for whomever might chance upon it? Given the chance to send out some small “message in a bottle”, hoping it might someday, somehow, have some positive impact, what would it be?
Considering that question brought me back to what in my mind is the fundamental point of the Buddha-dharma: the study of the self. Dogen Zenji wrote, “To study the buddha way is to study the self”. He recognized that the study of the self is the foundation for all practice since it truly addresses everything we encounter in life. Everything we meet is experienced with our own particular body and mind. Although we can of course work to broaden our perspectives and see things from other points of view, we can never step completely outside of this self and take a look around at things with another person’s eyes. And no other person can step into our own hearts and minds and completelyadopt even the most simple of our perceptions.
So this study of the self is at the heart of our entire experience of living – the entirety of life and death. It addresses questions such as Who am I? What is my place in this world? What is the nature of my suffering and my well-being? What is my relationship to the things, other people, and beings I encounter? How do I live well? How do I live a life with meaning and direction? And ultimately it addresses What do I do in this moment? What do I do right now, right here? Examining these questions is really the fundamental point of the study of the self.
I think it is not an over-generalization to say that the misunderstanding of the nature of self is the root cause of most of the suffering we encounter in this life. Aggression, violence, exploitation, depression, despair, prejudice, war, intolerance, poverty, crime, etc., all originate from a misunderstanding of the nature of self.
Yet Buddhism’s stance on the nature of self appeared rather confusing to me when I first began studying it. On one hand, for example, I encountered teachings such as this from the Dhammapada:
Evil is done by oneself. By oneself is one purified. Evil is left undone by oneself. By oneself is one cleansed. Purity and impurity are one’s own doing. No one purifies another. No one else purifies one.1
And on the other hand we find passages like this:
Then Ven. Ananda went to the Blessed One and on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As he was sitting there he said to the Blessed One, “It is said that the world is empty, the world is empty, lord. In what respect is it said that the world is empty?”
“Insofar as it is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self: Thus it is said, Ananda, that the world is empty.”2
So it might appear as if the Buddha is contradicting himself in these quotes. I’ll address this seeming contradiction a bit later, but of course this question of the nature of the self is a huge subject. We can probably say that most of the Buddhist canon has been produced to illuminate the nature of self, but for this article I can only hope to add a tiny drop, based on a portion of my own experience, to the to the deep ocean of Buddhist teachings on the subject.
Tractors And Squirrels Subverting Dreams
In ancient China, the study of self developed a flavor that to contemporary students of Buddhism can seem abstruse or even mystical. For example, the story goes that when the eighth-century Chinese Master Nanyang Huizhong was asked if insentient beings can preach the dharma, he said, “They’re constantly preaching with ardor; they preach without pause.”3
The idea of all sentient and insentient beings offering the teachings of Buddhism might sound very alluring to some truth-seekers of the 21st century, I imagine. One could interpret it as pointing to some kind of romantic or mystical reality, some profound, mysterious truth lurking behind the “mere appearances” of experience.
But I don’t think this kind of mysterious interpretation is in line with the essential point of Buddhism. Buddhism, instead, is fundamentally a practical tradition. It only teaches us how to meet our lives, how to live in accordance with how things are, how to meet and study the self and engage it in practice. “All things expounding dharma” points to the reality that everything we encounter in this life is offering us a teaching, an opportunity to study/express the “true self” in practice.
But often the “dharma realization” opportunities we encounter in this life are not so easy to meet. We often would prefer not to receive their “help”. In fact their teachings often appear to us as some kind of difficulty or even some profound loss or disappointment. We might intellectually believe that we should view everything we encounter as the dharma, but this is often not so easy to realize in actual practice. And it sometimes even seems our experience gives us something that actually hinders our faith and taxes our energy.
I encountered such a situation some time ago when I first began establishing Gyobutsuji, a small monastic practice place located in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. That was the time I first met the “tractor dharma”, which has frankly more often felt like the realization of a nightmare rather than the realization of Buddha-dharma
For quite a few years I had been thinking and dreaming of establishing a place to practice in thedistinctive style of Uchiyama Roshi and my own teacher, considering the most important conditions that would need to be in place for supporting zazen and how to bring those conditions together. The place, I decided, would need to be in a beautiful, mountainous area, as is traditional for a Zen monastery, and perhaps most importantly, it would need to be serenely quiet and peaceful. I understood that we can do zazen anywhere; we can do it in a noisy urban area, a deeply serene natural setting, and all variations of environmental conditions in between. However, I wanted Gyobutsuji to be a refuge for those who really wanted to focus on zazen for some period. I wanted its beauty and serenity to be inspiring and refreshing to the hearts and minds of those who might feel wearied by the troubles and demands of today’s society. Hopefully those returning to a busier environment after being at Gyobutsuji for some period could offer others some connection to the peace and joy realized in a quiet, natural practice environment.
Some years later I was thrilled when, with the help of a very kind and generous friend, I had the opportunity to purchase a lovely densely wooded piece of acreage with two beautiful waterfalls, nearby ponds, abundant wildlife, and a small off-grid structure that could serve as a living quarters and practice place for a few people. It was an enchanting place, and most importantly, I was assured that it was quiet. I thought it was the ideal location, and I promptly fell in love with it.
Well, maybe you know how it is when you first fall in love. It can seem the relationship is special, even “a dream come true”, perhaps. But of course sooner or later reality sets in and we have to deal with what’s actually presenting itself beyond our own hopes and fantasies; no situation or being can truly fulfill all of our desires.
In any case I began settling into this lovely place near the end of 2011, and almost immediately it seemed my dream was being shattered. The fly in the ointment was a tractor in the holler. Although the farm (containing the only neighbors within at least a mile or two of us) running the tractor is quite far away and mostly invisible to us, the manner in which sound travels up through the valley below often makes the machine sound as if it were in our front yard excavating boulders.
The first time I viewed the property I was told there was an organic shiitake mushroom farm in the valley below, but I had been assured that the land was very quiet. And besides, I thought, how much noise could a mushroom farm create?
Well, as it turned out the former owners of our property had never actually lived on the site for a long period of time; they had used it primarily as an occasional “get away” place. They no doubt didn’t realize that something had changed at the farm below and the tractor was now a regular contributor to the local soundscape.
So I began experiencing a really strong reaction to the sound of the tractor. After living on the property for a while, I realized the noise would not be just an occasional occurrence but something I would have to have to deal with on a regular basis. Accompanying the the feelings of anger and frustration came thoughts and emotions of how bad things were and how incompetent I was. “You made a bad decision. You’re no good. This is horrible. This is a really bad situation. I can’t get out of it. What am I going to do? Everything’s ruined. My dream is ruined.” I understood that the thoughts were neither useful nor “true” in a sense, and I tried to practice with them. Still the reactions came up, however, in very strong way whenever I heard the tractor.
And there have been other sorts of upsetting developments at Gyobutsuji. There was also the infamous “squirrel scandal”, for instance. Soon after I moved to the property, I noticed the regular activities of a very lively and apparently curious squirrel on our deck, a lovely structure overlooking the beautiful valley (where the farm is located) below. Two large naturally finished cedar logs act as supporting pillars for its tastefully designed and skillfully constructed roof. In the building to which it attaches, two glass siding doors form the major portion of the west and north walls, and during my daily study period I sit in a spot where I can look out over the deck to the mountains flanking our west side. During this study time the squirrel had almost always appeared; he/she was a regular. Initially the squirrel seemed simply to be checking out the space. It would often run across the large rolled-up sunshade that helps protect the building from the intense sunlight that pours in during certain months of the year. Then I began to consistently hear a gnawing sound each time the squirrel showed up, although I couldn’t actually see what was being chewed. When I investigated, I saw that the critter had been chewing a thin layer of some kind of mildew growing on one of the roof’s beams located above the sunshade. I thought, “Oh, that’s very interesting. It’s kind of cute. Maybe its even helping to clean those beams up.”
As time wore on, I continued to occasionally hear the gnawing sound coming from different places around the deck; sometimes it would be below, sometimes above or to the side, but I figured the squirrel was simply cleaning up more mildew. Once day, however, when I tried to unroll the sunshade, I discovered that the chord used to pull it up and down was broken. It was a hot day and and since the shade couldn’t be pulled down, there was no way to keep the sun from pouring in through the glass doors. I thought it strange that the cord had broken – there were no sighs of rot and the break hadn’t happened when I was pulling it. Then I realized, “It was the squirrel”
I was able to change the cord (with a good amount of difficulty in finding the correct replacement) but I now began viewing our resident rodent in a somewhat less indifferent light. That light became definitely negative, to say the least, some time later after returning to Gyobutsuji from a fairly long trip. It was then I found that large chucks of wood had apparently been chewed out from the wooden railing around the deck, and there were long, ¼-inch thick strips of wood missing from the beautiful cedar pillars supporting the roof…. Arrrrrrgh! Needless to say, I no longer considered our squirrel neighbor the least bit cute.
Tractors and Squirrels Are Empty of Self
So here are two examples of the self asserting itself in a very pronounced way. Of course the self arises almost continually during our waking hours, but at certain times we can feel it intensely. Usually this is accompanied by a strong clinging to the emotions, thoughts and judgments concerning the “things out there” we view as having provoked us. We cling to a very definite opinion of what is happening in our world, perhaps saying things like, “This is right. That is wrong. I am right. You are wrong”. Sometimes we may think, “I really have to have this” or “I really don’t want this; things need to be different”, and on other occasions we simply feel bored or apathetic. Yet all these instances are just different variations on the arising of self.
Shakyamuni Buddha of course taught much on the study of the self, and he described its arising in different ways. One of these descriptions found in the early Pāli Buddhist texts is known as the teaching of the Eighteen Elements. It said basically that when an object of a sense organ like a tractor sound meets the ear, some kind of consciousness or experience arises. The buddha warned us not to identify with any of these eighteen elements because each of them is empty of self. The elements are: the six sense organs (including mind), objects of the six sense organs, and the six types of consciousness arising due to the contact between the sense organs and their objects. We can apply this kind of analysis to any experience, including experiences such as daydreaming in which the objects of contact are objects solely of the mind; the Buddha considered in this model that the mind itself is a kind of sense organ with its own particular objects.
At this point I would like to present a very famous sermon of the Buddha because I think it addresses directly this kind of intense arsing of the self I have been discussing. This short sutta, known as the “Fire Sermon”, is found in the Samyutta Nikaya:
I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying in Gaya, at Gaya Head, with 1,000 monks. There he addressed the monks:
“Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.
“The ear is aflame. Sounds are aflame…
“The nose is aflame. Aromas are aflame…
“The tongue is aflame. Flavors are aflame…
“The body is aflame. Tactile sensations are aflame…
“The intellect is aflame. Ideas are aflame. Consciousness at the intellect is aflame. Contact at the intellect is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.
“Seeing thus, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones grows disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with consciousness at the eye, disenchanted with contact at the eye. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: With that, too, he grows disenchanted.
“He grows disenchanted with the ear…
“He grows disenchanted with the nose…
“He grows disenchanted with the tongue…
“He grows disenchanted with the body…
“He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with consciousness at the intellect, disenchanted with contact at the intellect. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: He grows disenchanted with that too. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, ‘Fully released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.'”
That is what the Blessed One said. Gratified, the monks delighted at his words. And while this explanation was being given, the hearts of the 1,000 monks, through no clinging (not being sustained), were fully released from fermentation/effluents. 4
So the Buddha said that all of those elements, the sense organs, the objects of the sense organs, the contact5 between the sense organs and their objects, and the consciousness that therefore arises, are aflame with greed, hatred, and delusion. All of our suffering originates in these elements and their interactions.
I find it is very interesting that the Buddha treats all of the self’s elements of experience equally. To my mind, the fact he doesn’t say the sense organs themselves are burning more fiercely than the objects of the sense organs points to a perhaps subtle but key point. That point is that he is considering the objects of our experience as part of the arising of self and is making no comment about those objects “in themselves”. The Buddha is limiting his discussion to a set of phenomena that arise in relationship to each other, phenomena we mistakenly grasp as an individual self. It’s as if he realizes that there is no way, really, to talk about the objects of our experience outside of our relationship to them. We cannot step outside of our bodies and minds and see the thing in itself “out there”6. The objects in a sense “create” us and we “create” them. In fact part of the reason the objects of our experience are aflame with suffering is that we mistakenly assume we are encountering the “truth” of the objects when we are in fact experiencing them as a series of conditioned reactions. When in the course of everyday life we encounter some object or situation, we most likely take it for granted that we are experiencing something “out there”, apart from ourselves. But things just aren’t so simple.
This makes me think of an interesting episode of a radio program7 I heard recently. One of the stories the program presented at first seemed so incredible that I wondered if it were some kind of hoax. It featured a woman who experienced a very unusual difficulty in many different situations. She couldn’t remain in the same room with her husband when he was eating, for example, because when she did so she felt as if someone was shoving food into her mouth. If she witnessed someone in the room receiving a hug, she felt a hug. If she saw someone being pinched on the arm, she felt pain on the exact same spot on her own arm. This woman literally felt the experiences of the people around her.
During the program she related a chilling account of her desperate attempt to catch a child falling from a shopping cart in a grocery store. She rushed frantically to catch the child, but incredibly she was stopped short as she witnessed the child hit its head; at that instant she felt a tremendous blow to her own head, fell to her knees, and began feeling as if she might lose consciousness (I assume both she and the child were OK in the end, thought the woman didn’t say).
And it wasn’t only physical sensations this person shared with others; she also seemed inextricably linked to the emotional responses of those around her.
The broadcast went on to reveal that this woman has a rare condition called “mirror-touch synesthesia”. It was explained that the “touch centers” in the brains of people with this condition are hypersensitive to visual stimulation. According to a scientist appearing on the program, everyone’s touch centers are sympathetically stimulated when witnessing, for example, a person getting a hug, but the responses are so minute that we usually don’t notice them. The centers of people with mirror-touch synesthesia, however, respond as if receiving stimulation from an actual hug.
During the story it was mentioned In passing that our experience, say, of a pinch on the arm, is “manufactured” in the brain though initiated by sense receptors in the arm. This relationship between the stimulation of a sense organ and the actual experience of the sensation is of course true of our other sensory experiences of taste, smell, vision, and hearing as well. To me, this was one of the most interesting parts of the story: the fact that a scientific perspective was telling us that the nature of our experience is not at all what we commonly assume it is. We assume we are experiencing some object “out there”, perhaps that we are even experiencing it the way it “really is”. But upon reflection it’s clear we are not experiencing the “thing in itself”; we are instead experiencing our reaction to some kind of sensory stimulation. The observation takes place within us, not somewhere “out there”.
So things get really sticky when we try to pin down exactly where experience originates. Does it originate in the mind? Does it originate in our sense organs? Does it originate in the contact of the sense organ and its object? Does it originate in the object? If we reflect upon the question, sooner or later it becomes apparent that any answer we come up with resembles a philosophical opinion more than a definitive answer; is very difficult to find a clear-cut boundary between experience and the objects of those experiences.
And we can take this analysis of the boundary further. As I said, usually we assume some object outside of us “triggers” our responses. But the separate, “outside” existence of an object before and after that triggering is basically just a concept residing in our minds. I might be certain, for example, that the mountains residing beyond my deck are still there when I turn my back on them and no longer see them. But on a fundamental level, the mountains I am certain of are only objects of my mind; they are memories or concepts of mountains rather than the mountains themselves. Yet too often we confuse the two.
On a level of “bare bones” experience, void of the biases of conceptualization, we might say that the object of our experience and the experience itself arise simultaneously. So can we really definitively say just where the “objective world” ends and our “subjective world” begins? When we really try to pin down the precise boundary between “within” and “without”, it eludes us.
Getting back to the radio program, I think another teaching its story illustrates is that each of us experiences his or her world in a unique way. The experiential reality of the woman with mirror-touch synesthesia must be very different than most other people’s realities. It’s also common knowledge that different animal species must also experience their worlds in radically different ways than human beings. We know that dogs navigate their worlds primarily with their noses8, bats “see” with sound, and amazingly, birds have the ability to see in a four-dimensional color space9. We can easily see how each of the worlds of these various animals must be very different from each other and from our own.
But with a bit of reflection, we can also clearly see that each individual human being lives in a unique world of his or her own. We can understand that innumerable, ever-changing factors influence the way each individual experiences their reality, and although many of these factors are shared with others, many are not. So a combination of both shared and distinctive conditions combine in each person to create a world that in some respects “overlaps” the worlds of others but is at the same time fundamentally unique.
On an April day, for example, I might wake up to a puffy-eyed, sneezing and grouchy world highly conditioned by air-born pollen triggering my allergies, while you, on the other hand, arise refreshed and enthused to work in your garden on a sunshine-and-flower-filled spring day. We’re both experiencing a sunny, April morning, but mine is quit different than yours.
In fact, innumerable factors come into play to create two different (albeit overlapping) worlds for us. The year each of us was born, the number of siblings we have, the structure of our DNA, how many hours we slept the night before, what we had for dinner the previous evening, the results of the last presidential election, the status of the U.S. economy, etc., etc., continue to create and affect our unique worlds.
But even if these observations seem less than convincing to some, most of us would probably agree every person’s world is totally unique in one fundamental and undeniable way: there is only one person existing who can ever experience it. You cannot step into my body/mind and experience my world, and vice versa.
So, returning to the Fire Sermon, an important piece of wisdom it teaches us is thatwe’re experiencing a reaction to some object rather than the object itself. We’re not experiencing truth or reality, we’re experiencing the burning the Buddha spoke of. In a situation where we are faced with something either really disagreeable like a noisy tractor or something really agreeable like a dish of our favorite ice cream/pie combination, the burning is pretty obvious. But we can see that the burning of the self is going on all of the time if we really settle down into our experience and take a good, honest look at what’s going on.
In any case, in dealing with extreme aversion or attraction the tendency is to reflexively grasp our reaction as real. We think, “That’s the way it is. This is real” and either “This is good” or “This is bad.” This is where real clinging comes in. We’re creating self out of our reaction and we’re ascribing a solid, independent existence to the stimulation or object as well. But the Buddha taught that all of those things, the object, the sense organ, the contact of object and sense organ, and the reaction to this contact are empty of self. That means they are impermanent, changing, and conditioned by other things. They don’t have any inherent existence of their own, so they are illusory in an ultimate sense.
This point of the emptiness of even the the constituent elements of the self was debated among early Buddhists, but the Prajna Paramita Sutras such as the Heart Sutra are clear on this point:
Therefore, given emptiness, there is… no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight…no realm of mind consciousness.
This of course is a negation of the permanent, independent existence of the eighteen elements themselves. Here the sutra plainly states that those elements are empty of any kind of inherent, permanent, separate nature of their own.
So the Heart Sutra helps us to understand why the eighteen elements are aflame with suffering – they burn because we project an inherent existence on them. It is our clinging to the subject/object relationship, a primary aspect of self-reification, that fuels the fire. When we view some of the elements as “me” while viewing others as “out there”, we’re prone to treat those “others” as objects to be sought after, rejected, or ignored, according to our preferences and views. At the same time we feel the need to protect, promote and defend those elements we identify as ourselves. This of course is a primary cause of suffering in our “individual” lives and within human society in general.
Tractors And Squirrels Are The Self
At this point I would like to talk about another description of this subject/object/consciousness relationship. It was offered by Eihei Dogen Zenji, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen. What follows is a short excerpt from his Shobogenzo Makahanya Haramitsu, which is a commentary of sorts on The Heart Sutra:
The twelve sense fields10 are twelve instances of prajna paramita. Also, there are eighteen instances of prajna paramita: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, form, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of mind, as well as the consciousness of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind11.
Here it seems Dogen Zenji is saying the exact opposite of the Fire Sermon. He says these eighteen elements, the sense organs, their objects, and the consciousness that arises as a result of their contact, are prajna paramita, perfect wisdom. But actually I think in these two accounts we’re just getting two different expressions of how we can meet the self. The Bbuddha first describes how self arises when we meet it as “me”, but he says it is possible to become “disenchanted” with this self. Dogen Zenji is describing, I think, how the self appears when we meet it without enchantment. So a key teaching of Buddhism is being presented from different angles.
But how can we move from burning greed, hatred, and delusion within this subject/object contact to prajna paramita arising as the self? When we see the self intensely and habitually arising in response to a particular object, how do we deal with that arising?
The first inclination might be to simply treat the object of our discontent as “other”. If I adopted this view with the tractor noise, for example, what were my options? I could have just continued to endure a painful response, telling myself how bad things were and how my efforts were a failure; more than likely I would have “fallen off the deep end” taking this option. I also could have simply left Gyobutsuji and given up the whole endeavor (moving it to a new location just wasn’t an option for several reasons), and I did consider doing that. I suppose I could have tried to sabotaged the tractor, or paid the farm a visit and said “stop producing those mushrooms, stop making a living and offering food – your tractor is bothering me!”
But seriously, after a bit of consideration, it became apparent that the only sensible way to deal with this situation was to make some adaptations in the way I was responding to it. First there was the noise. It was simply an auditory object, but I was responding emotionally to a kind of “enemy machine” in my mind. The tractor wasn’t some thing “out there” and it wasn’t “making” me angry; it was instead a kind of “auditory construct”, colored deeply by my own conditioning. The disappointment and shattered dreams were my own responsibility, they weren’t things being forced upon me from some foreign object that rendered me a victim. In fact, the noise and my emotional responses were all showing me where and how I was clinging to self. They were my teachers.
The more I stepped back and examined what was going on with my response to the noise, the more clinging I saw. The layers seemed to just go on and on. With each level, it seemed the scenario of how things “had to be” grew more fixed and more distant from direct experience. The scenario was simply a conceptual object of mind, but I had been certain of it. I had been certain, for example, that if Gyobutsuji were not immaculately quiet, no one would want to practice here; I had been certain that if no one wanted to practice here, the project would be a failure; I had been certain that if the project were a failure, I would be a failure….etc., etc. Seeing this reminded me how deeply and covertly the projection of self extends and how important it is to stay vigilant in order to practice with it.
In certain situations it’s pretty obvious that we must simply acknowledge we have encountered some difficulty and then adjust our response to that difficulty. This is just the way things are sometimes: we have to accept something we don’t really want to accept and learn to practice with it in an adult manner. In cases like that of the squirrel, however, the most workable solution is not so immediately obvious. Since human beings don’t generally consider the capturing or exterminating of a squirrel12 on par with the sabotaging of someone’s tractor, it seems there are more viable options. So of course part of the challenge in meeting difficult situations is (speaking from a conventional perspective) discerning whether we must simply accept and focus on “solely internal” change or actively try to make some responsible and wholesome change in “our environment”. (Of course In actuality life mostly presents us with situations that call for some combination of these two options.)
Our attitude and understanding of the “self/other” relationship can make a huge difference in the way we approach difficulties. If we are simply blinded by our greed, hatred, and delusion, we’re likely to do something regrettable, something painful or harmful to others and/or to ourselves. This intensely delusive self can arise very quickly, and it can manifest as a sort of insanity that propels us to act before we realize what has happened.
But let’s return now to the question of how we can meet the self as prajna paramita rather than greed, hatred and delusion. Of course the intellectual analysis and understanding of our clinging can be very helpful, but given the intensity of the arising delusive self, how can we actively allow wisdom to arise in its place? How do we become “disenchanted”, as the Buddha said, by ourselves and by the objects we encounter? There must be some way to practice with the “intense self” in the moment of its arising.
This short but well-known excerpt from Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo Genjokoanaddresses, I believe, this matter of how we can realize prajna paramita:
To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by all things. To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off.13
Of course much has been written about these lines and they can be interpreted in many different ways. But I’d like to say just a few words about how they have inspired my practice.
To study the buddha way is to study the self. – I believe this line coincides with the teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha I presented earlier:
Evil is done by oneself. By oneself is one purified. Evil is left undone by oneself. By oneself is one cleansed. Purity and impurity are one’s own doing. No one purifies another. No one else purifies one.
This concerns an essential attitude we must adopt in order to practice sincerely: taking responsibility. It’s useless to blame other people or conditions for our suffering. Only I can practice with this particular body and mind. You cannot sit my zazen for me. I cannot sit yours for you. No one but I can practice with the feelings that arise when I hear the tractor. I must accept that arising as self, and practice with it. I must understand there is not some thing “out there” “making” me angry. Evil, or suffering, is experienced by myself, and the alleviation of suffering, or practice, can only be done by myself.
So we should be careful not to misinterpret Buddhist teachings concerning the self. Actually, Shakyamuni and Dogen Zenji didn’t assert a dogma of “no self”; they instead taught us to cling neither to self nor non-self. So it’s a mistake if a person reasons, for example, “There’s no self, there’s no real ‘me’, so it is the tractor sound creating this suffering.” This is a sort of nihilism and in truth just a way of avoiding responsibility; there is still the projection of “self” or independence on the object of experience. But Dogen here is saying, just as the Buddha did, that we must take responsibility for our practice.
To study the self is to forget the self.
This has to do with how we handle the arising events we usually grasp as “me”. In some early texts the Buddha called this grasping “I-making”(Sanskrit & Pāli: ahaṅkāra). Here Dogen Zenji speaks of letting go of the I-making, of releasing our grasping (Sanskrit & Pāli: upādāna) to self. This includes letting go of the burning greed, hatred, and delusion spoken of in the Fire Sermon.
But how do is do we do this? I think this forgetting the self is our zazen. Doingshikantaza (Japanese, just sitting), sitting upright in the zazen posture, we let go of everything; we let go of the self. Instead of identifying with all of the thoughts, sensations, pain, pleasure and emotions that come up, we just let them go. We don’t cling to our experience; we neither affirm nor negate our experience in zazen. As Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, “leave your front door [of the mind] and back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”14 We don’t interpret our experience as self and we don’t say it’s non-self. We neither cling to it nor push it away.
And since no experience lasts forever, all or our states of mind and body eventually change – they are impermanent. When we just let them be, they arise and pass away like clouds gathering and dissipating in the sky. Our suffering is produced by resisting this change – either by trying to keep it from happening or by forcing it to happen in a way or at a rate we would prefer. So in zazen we are no longer bound to our suffering. We just let it be. This is forgetting the self – no longer being bound to the self. It sounds a lot like the root meaning of the Pāli word nibbana – “unbound”.
To forget the self is to be verified by all things. “Verify” is my teacher’s translation of the Japanese Buddhist term sho (証).
As I heard my teacher say many times, this sho is one of the three15 Japanese words that are often translated as “enlightenment”, but it actually has a more nuanced meaning. It carries the sense of a clear knowing, a verification or proof obtained from direct experience. One of Dogen Zenji’s greatest and most fundamental teachings was that our practice itself is sho, verification. He said enlightenment is the expression of prajna paramita realized through our zazen practice.
Dogen Zenji also said that our ordinary daily activities can be the direct expression of enlightenment. This is so when we allow them to be guided by practice; then they become part of our zazen. So when we practice deeply, releasing our grasping to the subject/object, self/other, greed/aversion etc. dichotomies, that itself is enlightenment or verification; in this moment here and now the boundaries between practice and the fruit or verification of practice drop away.
This is how everything becomes prajna paramita. Everything we experience becomes our teacher and an expression of truth if we don’t cling and we don’t push away. Things just are as they are. All experience then becomes the verification of the “practice self”, the “self” that is beyond the usual set of preferences and aversions we commonly identify with. This is the “self” that goes beyond our notions of self and non-self.
To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off . Kosho Uchiyama Roshi coined a word for forgetting the self; he called it “opening the hand of thought.” We usually grasp our experiences as “me”, clutch them with the mind’s “hand”, but in zazen we relax this grip and let the body and mind just be. This, I believe, is a contemporary way of expressing Dogen Zenji’s “dropping of body and mind,” dropping off boundaries between subject and object, self and non-self, self and other, buddhas and sentient beings, delusion and enlightenment. We allow all dichotomies, the primary sources of our suffering, to drop off. The bodies and minds of others drop off as well since we no longer view them as objects, as “other”.
“Dropping off body and mind” is, I think, Dogen Zenji’s expression of the buddha’s “released from the five aggregates (Sanskrit: skandha; Pāli: kkhandha)”. The fiveaggregates were another model he used in describing the self. The model basically says that clinging to body (form) and mind (sensation, perception, formation and consciousness) is the source of greed, hatred and delusion. The buddha said that being released or unbound from these aggregates is liberation.
When we’re able “open the hand” outside of the zendo in our daily lives, there is room for discernment without judgment. Of course reactions based on greed, hatred and delusion usually are not so skillful or wise. But when we let go of our judgment of whether something is intrinsically good or bad, it is more likely that we will be able to just see what needs to be done in any given situation. Obviously there is no definitive, blanket answer to every personal and societal problem we encounter, but if we can open our mind’s “hand” when judgmental thoughts and emotions arise, we allow an opening for real wisdom to manifest. If we stay trapped within our own little box of self and other, black and white, “this must be done and this must stop,” then we simply remain blind to the teachings and wisdom reality is offering us in each moment.
What should we do, for example, if some group of people appears threatening to us? Since we’re all human, probably none of us is totally immune from judgmental thoughts arising when we feel threatened. Do we, however, simply criticize those that are different from us and work to send them away? Or can we reflect and work to broaden our views so that our actions are informed by considering the perspectives of others? Learning to loosen our grip on our own views is a fundamental step in learning to live in harmony with others.
This, I think, is a primary way our zazen keeps informing and guiding all aspects our lives. It may seem that we just do zazen in the zendo, but when we truly devote ourselves to zazen, that zazen pervades all features of our everyday life, including the decisions we make and the way we treat the people, objects and situations we encounter. It both realizes and verifies our faith. It allows us to more clearly see the impermanence and interconnection of our experience, and this wisdom in turn engenders our faith in letting go of our hardened views. Worlds of new possibility can arise as we no longer always remain enslaved to old thought, behavior and speech habits that have caused so much suffering for ourselves and for others. Blind spots in our lives become illuminated, and we can say “I’m sorry, I was wrong and I’ll do better”, for example, to a loved one. We can have faith that the wisdom of a situation will arise if we let our self-centered motivations take a back seat.
Over time we can improve and become more skillful in “catching” the delusive self arising. But perhaps recognizing it after it comes up is the best we can do sometimes. If we even see, accept and reflect on our delusive actions, words or thoughts sometime after the event, that is a good start, and I imagine it is a rare practice in today’s world. However with some practice we can learn to notice the intense arising and deal with it before it consumes us. We can better understand our habitual responses and the conditions that trigger them, if we are diligent.
In my situation, I am still dealing with the emotions that arise when I hear our neighborhood tractor, but things are better. I keep reminding myself that each instance of hearing the noise is a possibility for practice. As time has gone on, the identification with my stories around it has settled down. Perhaps I will always have a pretty strong emotional response to the noise, but I know I have a choice in how I meet those emotions.
In practicing with those difficult feelings over the years, I’ve often been reminded that the mind in so many ways is a curious thing. It seems to try to grasp one small aspect of a situation, for example, and apply it to the whole. After practicing with the noise at Gyobutsuji for some time, for instance, I began to realize how often it is quiet here; it’s probably most of the time, in fact. Now during the spring and fall, I can better hear the music of the peepers (they’re little frogs) resonating in the evening twilight, and in late summer the chorus of the cicadas seems more vast and clear. On a snowy winter morning I can simply enjoy hearing the crunch of snow beneath my feet without fretting over when the next “noisy time” will come; its easier to just enjoy things for what they are, here and now. The beauty and teachings of the sounds of Gyobutsuji seem to be deepening all of the time.
To me, Dogen Zenji’s teaching on the one hand is very optimistic in regards to facing our limitations; it tells us that in any moment we can express complete awakening if we release our clinging. So even when we fall short, if we sincerely recognize that and renew our effort, there is another opportunity in the next moment to realize enlightenment. But on the other hand, of course, he is very tough because he never gives us an arrival point at which we can say “OK, finally I got it – I can take it easy!” – instead we must remain diligent and come back to awakening in the present over and over again in each moment.
As a final note I’d like to say something about zazen practice and “no gaining”, which is of course a very familiar and fundamental Zen teaching. I often feel compelled to say something about this point because it is a tricky one that can really trip us up if we’re not careful.
I don’t want to sound in this article as if I am advocating doing zazen for the sake of compassionately dealing with tractors and squirrels. If we do that, we subtly subvert ourselves; we are doing zazen for the sake of the deluded self’s agenda, even if that agenda seems to be a very good one. In zazen we must completely let go of self and non-self in order to let truth, prajna paramita, buddha nature, or whatever we would like to call it, arise. So we cannot let go of self being motivated by self. We don’t do zazen in order to become a better person because our idea of what a better person is is just a product of the self. However, when the gaining or “self-improvement” impulse does comes up, we don’t have to fret and worry – we just let it go, along with everything else.
In conclusion I would like to say that my true hope is that all beings become more intimate with the “true self” realized in practice. May its wisdom and compassion continue to be a healing balm for our troubled world during these challenging times and beyond.
1“Attavagga: Self” (Dhp XII), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.12.than.html .
2“Suñña Sutta: Empty” (SN 35.85), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013,http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.085.than.html .
3This quote is from Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo Mujo Seppo (The Insentient Preach The Dharma). A translation by Carl Bielefeldt can be found here:https://web.stanford.edu/group/scbs/sztp3/translations/shobogenzo/translations/mujo_seppo/pdf/mujo_seppo-translation.pdf .
4Adittapariyaya Sutta: The Fire Sermon” (SN 35.28), translated from the Pāli by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013,http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.than.html .
5 In this sutta he adds to the eighteen elements an additional six, the six contacts.
6Some might argue that this is accomplished by the scientific method, but I don’t agree. See Steve Hagen’sWhy the World Doesn’t Seem to Make Sense: An Inquiry Into Science, Philosophy and Perception (Sentient Publications, 2013) for an interesting and informed discussion of this point.
7I found the podcast for this program; it is an excellent NPR series called Invisibilia and can be found here (scroll down to the January 29, 2015 episode called “Entanglement”):http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia
8Here’s a short but very informative little video illuminating the world as seen by humankind’s best friend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7fXa2Occ_U
9Check out this article posted by the University of Bristol School of Biological Sciences if you are interested in this subject:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/biology/research/behaviour/vision/4d.html
10The six sense organs or faculties and their objects.
11Realizing Genjokoan: The Key To Dogen’s Shobogenzo by Shohaku Okumura, p.207 (Wisdom Publications, 2010)
12Our destructive little furry neighbor eventually just quit showing up. My dog Monty and I shewed him away whenever we caught sight of him near the deck, so perhaps the critter simply found a less stressful chewing venue.
13Realizing Genjokoan: The Key To Dogen’s Shobogenzo by Shohaku Okumura, p. 2 (Wisdom Publications, 2010)
14 Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teachings of Shunryu Suzuki, by David Chadwick, p.301(Broadway Books, 1999).
15. Go (悟) and kaku (覚) are the other two.
When my dharma sister asked me to contribute a piece to Ancient Way, I began thinking of what I might offer. What would be a fundamental point I could send “out there” for whomever might chance upon it? Given the chance to send out some small “message in a bottle”, hoping it might someday, somehow, have some positive impact, what would it be?
Considering that question brought me back to what in my mind is the fundamental point of the Buddha-dharma: the study of the self. Dogen Zenji wrote, “To study the buddha way is to study the self”. He recognized that the study of the self is the foundation for all practice since it truly addresses everything we encounter in life. Everything we meet is experienced with our own particular body and mind. Although we can of course work to broaden our perspectives and see things from other points of view, we can never step completely outside of this self and take a look around at things with another person’s eyes. And no other person can step into our own hearts and minds and completelyadopt even the most simple of our perceptions.
So this study of the self is at the heart of our entire experience of living – the entirety of life and death. It addresses questions such as Who am I? What is my place in this world? What is the nature of my suffering and my well-being? What is my relationship to the things, other people, and beings I encounter? How do I live well? How do I live a life with meaning and direction? And ultimately it addresses What do I do in this moment? What do I do right now, right here? Examining these questions is really the fundamental point of the study of the self.
I think it is not an over-generalization to say that the misunderstanding of the nature of self is the root cause of most of the suffering we encounter in this life. Aggression, violence, exploitation, depression, despair, prejudice, war, intolerance, poverty, crime, etc., all originate from a misunderstanding of the nature of self.
Yet Buddhism’s stance on the nature of self appeared rather confusing to me when I first began studying it. On one hand, for example, I encountered teachings such as this from the Dhammapada:
Evil is done by oneself. By oneself is one purified. Evil is left undone by oneself. By oneself is one cleansed. Purity and impurity are one’s own doing. No one purifies another. No one else purifies one.1
And on the other hand we find passages like this:
Then Ven. Ananda went to the Blessed One and on arrival, having bowed down to him, sat to one side. As he was sitting there he said to the Blessed One, “It is said that the world is empty, the world is empty, lord. In what respect is it said that the world is empty?”
“Insofar as it is empty of a self or of anything pertaining to a self: Thus it is said, Ananda, that the world is empty.”2
So it might appear as if the Buddha is contradicting himself in these quotes. I’ll address this seeming contradiction a bit later, but of course this question of the nature of the self is a huge subject. We can probably say that most of the Buddhist canon has been produced to illuminate the nature of self, but for this article I can only hope to add a tiny drop, based on a portion of my own experience, to the to the deep ocean of Buddhist teachings on the subject.
Tractors And Squirrels Subverting Dreams
In ancient China, the study of self developed a flavor that to contemporary students of Buddhism can seem abstruse or even mystical. For example, the story goes that when the eighth-century Chinese Master Nanyang Huizhong was asked if insentient beings can preach the dharma, he said, “They’re constantly preaching with ardor; they preach without pause.”3
The idea of all sentient and insentient beings offering the teachings of Buddhism might sound very alluring to some truth-seekers of the 21st century, I imagine. One could interpret it as pointing to some kind of romantic or mystical reality, some profound, mysterious truth lurking behind the “mere appearances” of experience.
But I don’t think this kind of mysterious interpretation is in line with the essential point of Buddhism. Buddhism, instead, is fundamentally a practical tradition. It only teaches us how to meet our lives, how to live in accordance with how things are, how to meet and study the self and engage it in practice. “All things expounding dharma” points to the reality that everything we encounter in this life is offering us a teaching, an opportunity to study/express the “true self” in practice.
But often the “dharma realization” opportunities we encounter in this life are not so easy to meet. We often would prefer not to receive their “help”. In fact their teachings often appear to us as some kind of difficulty or even some profound loss or disappointment. We might intellectually believe that we should view everything we encounter as the dharma, but this is often not so easy to realize in actual practice. And it sometimes even seems our experience gives us something that actually hinders our faith and taxes our energy.
I encountered such a situation some time ago when I first began establishing Gyobutsuji, a small monastic practice place located in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas. That was the time I first met the “tractor dharma”, which has frankly more often felt like the realization of a nightmare rather than the realization of Buddha-dharma
For quite a few years I had been thinking and dreaming of establishing a place to practice in thedistinctive style of Uchiyama Roshi and my own teacher, considering the most important conditions that would need to be in place for supporting zazen and how to bring those conditions together. The place, I decided, would need to be in a beautiful, mountainous area, as is traditional for a Zen monastery, and perhaps most importantly, it would need to be serenely quiet and peaceful. I understood that we can do zazen anywhere; we can do it in a noisy urban area, a deeply serene natural setting, and all variations of environmental conditions in between. However, I wanted Gyobutsuji to be a refuge for those who really wanted to focus on zazen for some period. I wanted its beauty and serenity to be inspiring and refreshing to the hearts and minds of those who might feel wearied by the troubles and demands of today’s society. Hopefully those returning to a busier environment after being at Gyobutsuji for some period could offer others some connection to the peace and joy realized in a quiet, natural practice environment.
Some years later I was thrilled when, with the help of a very kind and generous friend, I had the opportunity to purchase a lovely densely wooded piece of acreage with two beautiful waterfalls, nearby ponds, abundant wildlife, and a small off-grid structure that could serve as a living quarters and practice place for a few people. It was an enchanting place, and most importantly, I was assured that it was quiet. I thought it was the ideal location, and I promptly fell in love with it.
Well, maybe you know how it is when you first fall in love. It can seem the relationship is special, even “a dream come true”, perhaps. But of course sooner or later reality sets in and we have to deal with what’s actually presenting itself beyond our own hopes and fantasies; no situation or being can truly fulfill all of our desires.
In any case I began settling into this lovely place near the end of 2011, and almost immediately it seemed my dream was being shattered. The fly in the ointment was a tractor in the holler. Although the farm (containing the only neighbors within at least a mile or two of us) running the tractor is quite far away and mostly invisible to us, the manner in which sound travels up through the valley below often makes the machine sound as if it were in our front yard excavating boulders.
The first time I viewed the property I was told there was an organic shiitake mushroom farm in the valley below, but I had been assured that the land was very quiet. And besides, I thought, how much noise could a mushroom farm create?
Well, as it turned out the former owners of our property had never actually lived on the site for a long period of time; they had used it primarily as an occasional “get away” place. They no doubt didn’t realize that something had changed at the farm below and the tractor was now a regular contributor to the local soundscape.
So I began experiencing a really strong reaction to the sound of the tractor. After living on the property for a while, I realized the noise would not be just an occasional occurrence but something I would have to have to deal with on a regular basis. Accompanying the the feelings of anger and frustration came thoughts and emotions of how bad things were and how incompetent I was. “You made a bad decision. You’re no good. This is horrible. This is a really bad situation. I can’t get out of it. What am I going to do? Everything’s ruined. My dream is ruined.” I understood that the thoughts were neither useful nor “true” in a sense, and I tried to practice with them. Still the reactions came up, however, in very strong way whenever I heard the tractor.
And there have been other sorts of upsetting developments at Gyobutsuji. There was also the infamous “squirrel scandal”, for instance. Soon after I moved to the property, I noticed the regular activities of a very lively and apparently curious squirrel on our deck, a lovely structure overlooking the beautiful valley (where the farm is located) below. Two large naturally finished cedar logs act as supporting pillars for its tastefully designed and skillfully constructed roof. In the building to which it attaches, two glass siding doors form the major portion of the west and north walls, and during my daily study period I sit in a spot where I can look out over the deck to the mountains flanking our west side. During this study time the squirrel had almost always appeared; he/she was a regular. Initially the squirrel seemed simply to be checking out the space. It would often run across the large rolled-up sunshade that helps protect the building from the intense sunlight that pours in during certain months of the year. Then I began to consistently hear a gnawing sound each time the squirrel showed up, although I couldn’t actually see what was being chewed. When I investigated, I saw that the critter had been chewing a thin layer of some kind of mildew growing on one of the roof’s beams located above the sunshade. I thought, “Oh, that’s very interesting. It’s kind of cute. Maybe its even helping to clean those beams up.”
As time wore on, I continued to occasionally hear the gnawing sound coming from different places around the deck; sometimes it would be below, sometimes above or to the side, but I figured the squirrel was simply cleaning up more mildew. Once day, however, when I tried to unroll the sunshade, I discovered that the chord used to pull it up and down was broken. It was a hot day and and since the shade couldn’t be pulled down, there was no way to keep the sun from pouring in through the glass doors. I thought it strange that the cord had broken – there were no sighs of rot and the break hadn’t happened when I was pulling it. Then I realized, “It was the squirrel”
I was able to change the cord (with a good amount of difficulty in finding the correct replacement) but I now began viewing our resident rodent in a somewhat less indifferent light. That light became definitely negative, to say the least, some time later after returning to Gyobutsuji from a fairly long trip. It was then I found that large chucks of wood had apparently been chewed out from the wooden railing around the deck, and there were long, ¼-inch thick strips of wood missing from the beautiful cedar pillars supporting the roof…. Arrrrrrgh! Needless to say, I no longer considered our squirrel neighbor the least bit cute.
Tractors and Squirrels Are Empty of Self
So here are two examples of the self asserting itself in a very pronounced way. Of course the self arises almost continually during our waking hours, but at certain times we can feel it intensely. Usually this is accompanied by a strong clinging to the emotions, thoughts and judgments concerning the “things out there” we view as having provoked us. We cling to a very definite opinion of what is happening in our world, perhaps saying things like, “This is right. That is wrong. I am right. You are wrong”. Sometimes we may think, “I really have to have this” or “I really don’t want this; things need to be different”, and on other occasions we simply feel bored or apathetic. Yet all these instances are just different variations on the arising of self.
Shakyamuni Buddha of course taught much on the study of the self, and he described its arising in different ways. One of these descriptions found in the early Pāli Buddhist texts is known as the teaching of the Eighteen Elements. It said basically that when an object of a sense organ like a tractor sound meets the ear, some kind of consciousness or experience arises. The buddha warned us not to identify with any of these eighteen elements because each of them is empty of self. The elements are: the six sense organs (including mind), objects of the six sense organs, and the six types of consciousness arising due to the contact between the sense organs and their objects. We can apply this kind of analysis to any experience, including experiences such as daydreaming in which the objects of contact are objects solely of the mind; the Buddha considered in this model that the mind itself is a kind of sense organ with its own particular objects.
At this point I would like to present a very famous sermon of the Buddha because I think it addresses directly this kind of intense arsing of the self I have been discussing. This short sutta, known as the “Fire Sermon”, is found in the Samyutta Nikaya:
I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying in Gaya, at Gaya Head, with 1,000 monks. There he addressed the monks:
“Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.
“The ear is aflame. Sounds are aflame…
“The nose is aflame. Aromas are aflame…
“The tongue is aflame. Flavors are aflame…
“The body is aflame. Tactile sensations are aflame…
“The intellect is aflame. Ideas are aflame. Consciousness at the intellect is aflame. Contact at the intellect is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.
“Seeing thus, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones grows disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with consciousness at the eye, disenchanted with contact at the eye. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: With that, too, he grows disenchanted.
“He grows disenchanted with the ear…
“He grows disenchanted with the nose…
“He grows disenchanted with the tongue…
“He grows disenchanted with the body…
“He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with consciousness at the intellect, disenchanted with contact at the intellect. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: He grows disenchanted with that too. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, ‘Fully released.’ He discerns that ‘Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.'”
That is what the Blessed One said. Gratified, the monks delighted at his words. And while this explanation was being given, the hearts of the 1,000 monks, through no clinging (not being sustained), were fully released from fermentation/effluents. 4
So the Buddha said that all of those elements, the sense organs, the objects of the sense organs, the contact5 between the sense organs and their objects, and the consciousness that therefore arises, are aflame with greed, hatred, and delusion. All of our suffering originates in these elements and their interactions.
I find it is very interesting that the Buddha treats all of the self’s elements of experience equally. To my mind, the fact he doesn’t say the sense organs themselves are burning more fiercely than the objects of the sense organs points to a perhaps subtle but key point. That point is that he is considering the objects of our experience as part of the arising of self and is making no comment about those objects “in themselves”. The Buddha is limiting his discussion to a set of phenomena that arise in relationship to each other, phenomena we mistakenly grasp as an individual self. It’s as if he realizes that there is no way, really, to talk about the objects of our experience outside of our relationship to them. We cannot step outside of our bodies and minds and see the thing in itself “out there”6. The objects in a sense “create” us and we “create” them. In fact part of the reason the objects of our experience are aflame with suffering is that we mistakenly assume we are encountering the “truth” of the objects when we are in fact experiencing them as a series of conditioned reactions. When in the course of everyday life we encounter some object or situation, we most likely take it for granted that we are experiencing something “out there”, apart from ourselves. But things just aren’t so simple.
This makes me think of an interesting episode of a radio program7 I heard recently. One of the stories the program presented at first seemed so incredible that I wondered if it were some kind of hoax. It featured a woman who experienced a very unusual difficulty in many different situations. She couldn’t remain in the same room with her husband when he was eating, for example, because when she did so she felt as if someone was shoving food into her mouth. If she witnessed someone in the room receiving a hug, she felt a hug. If she saw someone being pinched on the arm, she felt pain on the exact same spot on her own arm. This woman literally felt the experiences of the people around her.
During the program she related a chilling account of her desperate attempt to catch a child falling from a shopping cart in a grocery store. She rushed frantically to catch the child, but incredibly she was stopped short as she witnessed the child hit its head; at that instant she felt a tremendous blow to her own head, fell to her knees, and began feeling as if she might lose consciousness (I assume both she and the child were OK in the end, thought the woman didn’t say).
And it wasn’t only physical sensations this person shared with others; she also seemed inextricably linked to the emotional responses of those around her.
The broadcast went on to reveal that this woman has a rare condition called “mirror-touch synesthesia”. It was explained that the “touch centers” in the brains of people with this condition are hypersensitive to visual stimulation. According to a scientist appearing on the program, everyone’s touch centers are sympathetically stimulated when witnessing, for example, a person getting a hug, but the responses are so minute that we usually don’t notice them. The centers of people with mirror-touch synesthesia, however, respond as if receiving stimulation from an actual hug.
During the story it was mentioned In passing that our experience, say, of a pinch on the arm, is “manufactured” in the brain though initiated by sense receptors in the arm. This relationship between the stimulation of a sense organ and the actual experience of the sensation is of course true of our other sensory experiences of taste, smell, vision, and hearing as well. To me, this was one of the most interesting parts of the story: the fact that a scientific perspective was telling us that the nature of our experience is not at all what we commonly assume it is. We assume we are experiencing some object “out there”, perhaps that we are even experiencing it the way it “really is”. But upon reflection it’s clear we are not experiencing the “thing in itself”; we are instead experiencing our reaction to some kind of sensory stimulation. The observation takes place within us, not somewhere “out there”.
So things get really sticky when we try to pin down exactly where experience originates. Does it originate in the mind? Does it originate in our sense organs? Does it originate in the contact of the sense organ and its object? Does it originate in the object? If we reflect upon the question, sooner or later it becomes apparent that any answer we come up with resembles a philosophical opinion more than a definitive answer; is very difficult to find a clear-cut boundary between experience and the objects of those experiences.
And we can take this analysis of the boundary further. As I said, usually we assume some object outside of us “triggers” our responses. But the separate, “outside” existence of an object before and after that triggering is basically just a concept residing in our minds. I might be certain, for example, that the mountains residing beyond my deck are still there when I turn my back on them and no longer see them. But on a fundamental level, the mountains I am certain of are only objects of my mind; they are memories or concepts of mountains rather than the mountains themselves. Yet too often we confuse the two.
On a level of “bare bones” experience, void of the biases of conceptualization, we might say that the object of our experience and the experience itself arise simultaneously. So can we really definitively say just where the “objective world” ends and our “subjective world” begins? When we really try to pin down the precise boundary between “within” and “without”, it eludes us.
Getting back to the radio program, I think another teaching its story illustrates is that each of us experiences his or her world in a unique way. The experiential reality of the woman with mirror-touch synesthesia must be very different than most other people’s realities. It’s also common knowledge that different animal species must also experience their worlds in radically different ways than human beings. We know that dogs navigate their worlds primarily with their noses8, bats “see” with sound, and amazingly, birds have the ability to see in a four-dimensional color space9. We can easily see how each of the worlds of these various animals must be very different from each other and from our own.
But with a bit of reflection, we can also clearly see that each individual human being lives in a unique world of his or her own. We can understand that innumerable, ever-changing factors influence the way each individual experiences their reality, and although many of these factors are shared with others, many are not. So a combination of both shared and distinctive conditions combine in each person to create a world that in some respects “overlaps” the worlds of others but is at the same time fundamentally unique.
On an April day, for example, I might wake up to a puffy-eyed, sneezing and grouchy world highly conditioned by air-born pollen triggering my allergies, while you, on the other hand, arise refreshed and enthused to work in your garden on a sunshine-and-flower-filled spring day. We’re both experiencing a sunny, April morning, but mine is quit different than yours.
In fact, innumerable factors come into play to create two different (albeit overlapping) worlds for us. The year each of us was born, the number of siblings we have, the structure of our DNA, how many hours we slept the night before, what we had for dinner the previous evening, the results of the last presidential election, the status of the U.S. economy, etc., etc., continue to create and affect our unique worlds.
But even if these observations seem less than convincing to some, most of us would probably agree every person’s world is totally unique in one fundamental and undeniable way: there is only one person existing who can ever experience it. You cannot step into my body/mind and experience my world, and vice versa.
So, returning to the Fire Sermon, an important piece of wisdom it teaches us is thatwe’re experiencing a reaction to some object rather than the object itself. We’re not experiencing truth or reality, we’re experiencing the burning the Buddha spoke of. In a situation where we are faced with something either really disagreeable like a noisy tractor or something really agreeable like a dish of our favorite ice cream/pie combination, the burning is pretty obvious. But we can see that the burning of the self is going on all of the time if we really settle down into our experience and take a good, honest look at what’s going on.
In any case, in dealing with extreme aversion or attraction the tendency is to reflexively grasp our reaction as real. We think, “That’s the way it is. This is real” and either “This is good” or “This is bad.” This is where real clinging comes in. We’re creating self out of our reaction and we’re ascribing a solid, independent existence to the stimulation or object as well. But the Buddha taught that all of those things, the object, the sense organ, the contact of object and sense organ, and the reaction to this contact are empty of self. That means they are impermanent, changing, and conditioned by other things. They don’t have any inherent existence of their own, so they are illusory in an ultimate sense.
This point of the emptiness of even the the constituent elements of the self was debated among early Buddhists, but the Prajna Paramita Sutras such as the Heart Sutra are clear on this point:
Therefore, given emptiness, there is… no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight…no realm of mind consciousness.
This of course is a negation of the permanent, independent existence of the eighteen elements themselves. Here the sutra plainly states that those elements are empty of any kind of inherent, permanent, separate nature of their own.
So the Heart Sutra helps us to understand why the eighteen elements are aflame with suffering – they burn because we project an inherent existence on them. It is our clinging to the subject/object relationship, a primary aspect of self-reification, that fuels the fire. When we view some of the elements as “me” while viewing others as “out there”, we’re prone to treat those “others” as objects to be sought after, rejected, or ignored, according to our preferences and views. At the same time we feel the need to protect, promote and defend those elements we identify as ourselves. This of course is a primary cause of suffering in our “individual” lives and within human society in general.
Tractors And Squirrels Are The Self
At this point I would like to talk about another description of this subject/object/consciousness relationship. It was offered by Eihei Dogen Zenji, the founder of Japanese Soto Zen. What follows is a short excerpt from his Shobogenzo Makahanya Haramitsu, which is a commentary of sorts on The Heart Sutra:
The twelve sense fields10 are twelve instances of prajna paramita. Also, there are eighteen instances of prajna paramita: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mind, form, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of mind, as well as the consciousness of eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind11.
Here it seems Dogen Zenji is saying the exact opposite of the Fire Sermon. He says these eighteen elements, the sense organs, their objects, and the consciousness that arises as a result of their contact, are prajna paramita, perfect wisdom. But actually I think in these two accounts we’re just getting two different expressions of how we can meet the self. The Bbuddha first describes how self arises when we meet it as “me”, but he says it is possible to become “disenchanted” with this self. Dogen Zenji is describing, I think, how the self appears when we meet it without enchantment. So a key teaching of Buddhism is being presented from different angles.
But how can we move from burning greed, hatred, and delusion within this subject/object contact to prajna paramita arising as the self? When we see the self intensely and habitually arising in response to a particular object, how do we deal with that arising?
The first inclination might be to simply treat the object of our discontent as “other”. If I adopted this view with the tractor noise, for example, what were my options? I could have just continued to endure a painful response, telling myself how bad things were and how my efforts were a failure; more than likely I would have “fallen off the deep end” taking this option. I also could have simply left Gyobutsuji and given up the whole endeavor (moving it to a new location just wasn’t an option for several reasons), and I did consider doing that. I suppose I could have tried to sabotaged the tractor, or paid the farm a visit and said “stop producing those mushrooms, stop making a living and offering food – your tractor is bothering me!”
But seriously, after a bit of consideration, it became apparent that the only sensible way to deal with this situation was to make some adaptations in the way I was responding to it. First there was the noise. It was simply an auditory object, but I was responding emotionally to a kind of “enemy machine” in my mind. The tractor wasn’t some thing “out there” and it wasn’t “making” me angry; it was instead a kind of “auditory construct”, colored deeply by my own conditioning. The disappointment and shattered dreams were my own responsibility, they weren’t things being forced upon me from some foreign object that rendered me a victim. In fact, the noise and my emotional responses were all showing me where and how I was clinging to self. They were my teachers.
The more I stepped back and examined what was going on with my response to the noise, the more clinging I saw. The layers seemed to just go on and on. With each level, it seemed the scenario of how things “had to be” grew more fixed and more distant from direct experience. The scenario was simply a conceptual object of mind, but I had been certain of it. I had been certain, for example, that if Gyobutsuji were not immaculately quiet, no one would want to practice here; I had been certain that if no one wanted to practice here, the project would be a failure; I had been certain that if the project were a failure, I would be a failure….etc., etc. Seeing this reminded me how deeply and covertly the projection of self extends and how important it is to stay vigilant in order to practice with it.
In certain situations it’s pretty obvious that we must simply acknowledge we have encountered some difficulty and then adjust our response to that difficulty. This is just the way things are sometimes: we have to accept something we don’t really want to accept and learn to practice with it in an adult manner. In cases like that of the squirrel, however, the most workable solution is not so immediately obvious. Since human beings don’t generally consider the capturing or exterminating of a squirrel12 on par with the sabotaging of someone’s tractor, it seems there are more viable options. So of course part of the challenge in meeting difficult situations is (speaking from a conventional perspective) discerning whether we must simply accept and focus on “solely internal” change or actively try to make some responsible and wholesome change in “our environment”. (Of course In actuality life mostly presents us with situations that call for some combination of these two options.)
Our attitude and understanding of the “self/other” relationship can make a huge difference in the way we approach difficulties. If we are simply blinded by our greed, hatred, and delusion, we’re likely to do something regrettable, something painful or harmful to others and/or to ourselves. This intensely delusive self can arise very quickly, and it can manifest as a sort of insanity that propels us to act before we realize what has happened.
But let’s return now to the question of how we can meet the self as prajna paramita rather than greed, hatred and delusion. Of course the intellectual analysis and understanding of our clinging can be very helpful, but given the intensity of the arising delusive self, how can we actively allow wisdom to arise in its place? How do we become “disenchanted”, as the Buddha said, by ourselves and by the objects we encounter? There must be some way to practice with the “intense self” in the moment of its arising.
This short but well-known excerpt from Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo Genjokoanaddresses, I believe, this matter of how we can realize prajna paramita:
To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be verified by all things. To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off.13
Of course much has been written about these lines and they can be interpreted in many different ways. But I’d like to say just a few words about how they have inspired my practice.
To study the buddha way is to study the self. – I believe this line coincides with the teaching of Shakyamuni Buddha I presented earlier:
Evil is done by oneself. By oneself is one purified. Evil is left undone by oneself. By oneself is one cleansed. Purity and impurity are one’s own doing. No one purifies another. No one else purifies one.
This concerns an essential attitude we must adopt in order to practice sincerely: taking responsibility. It’s useless to blame other people or conditions for our suffering. Only I can practice with this particular body and mind. You cannot sit my zazen for me. I cannot sit yours for you. No one but I can practice with the feelings that arise when I hear the tractor. I must accept that arising as self, and practice with it. I must understand there is not some thing “out there” “making” me angry. Evil, or suffering, is experienced by myself, and the alleviation of suffering, or practice, can only be done by myself.
So we should be careful not to misinterpret Buddhist teachings concerning the self. Actually, Shakyamuni and Dogen Zenji didn’t assert a dogma of “no self”; they instead taught us to cling neither to self nor non-self. So it’s a mistake if a person reasons, for example, “There’s no self, there’s no real ‘me’, so it is the tractor sound creating this suffering.” This is a sort of nihilism and in truth just a way of avoiding responsibility; there is still the projection of “self” or independence on the object of experience. But Dogen here is saying, just as the Buddha did, that we must take responsibility for our practice.
To study the self is to forget the self.
This has to do with how we handle the arising events we usually grasp as “me”. In some early texts the Buddha called this grasping “I-making”(Sanskrit & Pāli: ahaṅkāra). Here Dogen Zenji speaks of letting go of the I-making, of releasing our grasping (Sanskrit & Pāli: upādāna) to self. This includes letting go of the burning greed, hatred, and delusion spoken of in the Fire Sermon.
But how do is do we do this? I think this forgetting the self is our zazen. Doingshikantaza (Japanese, just sitting), sitting upright in the zazen posture, we let go of everything; we let go of the self. Instead of identifying with all of the thoughts, sensations, pain, pleasure and emotions that come up, we just let them go. We don’t cling to our experience; we neither affirm nor negate our experience in zazen. As Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said, “leave your front door [of the mind] and back door open. Let thoughts come and go. Just don’t serve them tea.”14 We don’t interpret our experience as self and we don’t say it’s non-self. We neither cling to it nor push it away.
And since no experience lasts forever, all or our states of mind and body eventually change – they are impermanent. When we just let them be, they arise and pass away like clouds gathering and dissipating in the sky. Our suffering is produced by resisting this change – either by trying to keep it from happening or by forcing it to happen in a way or at a rate we would prefer. So in zazen we are no longer bound to our suffering. We just let it be. This is forgetting the self – no longer being bound to the self. It sounds a lot like the root meaning of the Pāli word nibbana – “unbound”.
To forget the self is to be verified by all things. “Verify” is my teacher’s translation of the Japanese Buddhist term sho (証).
As I heard my teacher say many times, this sho is one of the three15 Japanese words that are often translated as “enlightenment”, but it actually has a more nuanced meaning. It carries the sense of a clear knowing, a verification or proof obtained from direct experience. One of Dogen Zenji’s greatest and most fundamental teachings was that our practice itself is sho, verification. He said enlightenment is the expression of prajna paramita realized through our zazen practice.
Dogen Zenji also said that our ordinary daily activities can be the direct expression of enlightenment. This is so when we allow them to be guided by practice; then they become part of our zazen. So when we practice deeply, releasing our grasping to the subject/object, self/other, greed/aversion etc. dichotomies, that itself is enlightenment or verification; in this moment here and now the boundaries between practice and the fruit or verification of practice drop away.
This is how everything becomes prajna paramita. Everything we experience becomes our teacher and an expression of truth if we don’t cling and we don’t push away. Things just are as they are. All experience then becomes the verification of the “practice self”, the “self” that is beyond the usual set of preferences and aversions we commonly identify with. This is the “self” that goes beyond our notions of self and non-self.
To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off . Kosho Uchiyama Roshi coined a word for forgetting the self; he called it “opening the hand of thought.” We usually grasp our experiences as “me”, clutch them with the mind’s “hand”, but in zazen we relax this grip and let the body and mind just be. This, I believe, is a contemporary way of expressing Dogen Zenji’s “dropping of body and mind,” dropping off boundaries between subject and object, self and non-self, self and other, buddhas and sentient beings, delusion and enlightenment. We allow all dichotomies, the primary sources of our suffering, to drop off. The bodies and minds of others drop off as well since we no longer view them as objects, as “other”.
“Dropping off body and mind” is, I think, Dogen Zenji’s expression of the buddha’s “released from the five aggregates (Sanskrit: skandha; Pāli: kkhandha)”. The fiveaggregates were another model he used in describing the self. The model basically says that clinging to body (form) and mind (sensation, perception, formation and consciousness) is the source of greed, hatred and delusion. The buddha said that being released or unbound from these aggregates is liberation.
When we’re able “open the hand” outside of the zendo in our daily lives, there is room for discernment without judgment. Of course reactions based on greed, hatred and delusion usually are not so skillful or wise. But when we let go of our judgment of whether something is intrinsically good or bad, it is more likely that we will be able to just see what needs to be done in any given situation. Obviously there is no definitive, blanket answer to every personal and societal problem we encounter, but if we can open our mind’s “hand” when judgmental thoughts and emotions arise, we allow an opening for real wisdom to manifest. If we stay trapped within our own little box of self and other, black and white, “this must be done and this must stop,” then we simply remain blind to the teachings and wisdom reality is offering us in each moment.
What should we do, for example, if some group of people appears threatening to us? Since we’re all human, probably none of us is totally immune from judgmental thoughts arising when we feel threatened. Do we, however, simply criticize those that are different from us and work to send them away? Or can we reflect and work to broaden our views so that our actions are informed by considering the perspectives of others? Learning to loosen our grip on our own views is a fundamental step in learning to live in harmony with others.
This, I think, is a primary way our zazen keeps informing and guiding all aspects our lives. It may seem that we just do zazen in the zendo, but when we truly devote ourselves to zazen, that zazen pervades all features of our everyday life, including the decisions we make and the way we treat the people, objects and situations we encounter. It both realizes and verifies our faith. It allows us to more clearly see the impermanence and interconnection of our experience, and this wisdom in turn engenders our faith in letting go of our hardened views. Worlds of new possibility can arise as we no longer always remain enslaved to old thought, behavior and speech habits that have caused so much suffering for ourselves and for others. Blind spots in our lives become illuminated, and we can say “I’m sorry, I was wrong and I’ll do better”, for example, to a loved one. We can have faith that the wisdom of a situation will arise if we let our self-centered motivations take a back seat.
Over time we can improve and become more skillful in “catching” the delusive self arising. But perhaps recognizing it after it comes up is the best we can do sometimes. If we even see, accept and reflect on our delusive actions, words or thoughts sometime after the event, that is a good start, and I imagine it is a rare practice in today’s world. However with some practice we can learn to notice the intense arising and deal with it before it consumes us. We can better understand our habitual responses and the conditions that trigger them, if we are diligent.
In my situation, I am still dealing with the emotions that arise when I hear our neighborhood tractor, but things are better. I keep reminding myself that each instance of hearing the noise is a possibility for practice. As time has gone on, the identification with my stories around it has settled down. Perhaps I will always have a pretty strong emotional response to the noise, but I know I have a choice in how I meet those emotions.
In practicing with those difficult feelings over the years, I’ve often been reminded that the mind in so many ways is a curious thing. It seems to try to grasp one small aspect of a situation, for example, and apply it to the whole. After practicing with the noise at Gyobutsuji for some time, for instance, I began to realize how often it is quiet here; it’s probably most of the time, in fact. Now during the spring and fall, I can better hear the music of the peepers (they’re little frogs) resonating in the evening twilight, and in late summer the chorus of the cicadas seems more vast and clear. On a snowy winter morning I can simply enjoy hearing the crunch of snow beneath my feet without fretting over when the next “noisy time” will come; its easier to just enjoy things for what they are, here and now. The beauty and teachings of the sounds of Gyobutsuji seem to be deepening all of the time.
To me, Dogen Zenji’s teaching on the one hand is very optimistic in regards to facing our limitations; it tells us that in any moment we can express complete awakening if we release our clinging. So even when we fall short, if we sincerely recognize that and renew our effort, there is another opportunity in the next moment to realize enlightenment. But on the other hand, of course, he is very tough because he never gives us an arrival point at which we can say “OK, finally I got it – I can take it easy!” – instead we must remain diligent and come back to awakening in the present over and over again in each moment.
As a final note I’d like to say something about zazen practice and “no gaining”, which is of course a very familiar and fundamental Zen teaching. I often feel compelled to say something about this point because it is a tricky one that can really trip us up if we’re not careful.
I don’t want to sound in this article as if I am advocating doing zazen for the sake of compassionately dealing with tractors and squirrels. If we do that, we subtly subvert ourselves; we are doing zazen for the sake of the deluded self’s agenda, even if that agenda seems to be a very good one. In zazen we must completely let go of self and non-self in order to let truth, prajna paramita, buddha nature, or whatever we would like to call it, arise. So we cannot let go of self being motivated by self. We don’t do zazen in order to become a better person because our idea of what a better person is is just a product of the self. However, when the gaining or “self-improvement” impulse does comes up, we don’t have to fret and worry – we just let it go, along with everything else.
In conclusion I would like to say that my true hope is that all beings become more intimate with the “true self” realized in practice. May its wisdom and compassion continue to be a healing balm for our troubled world during these challenging times and beyond.
1“Attavagga: Self” (Dhp XII), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.12.than.html .
2“Suñña Sutta: Empty” (SN 35.85), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013,http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.085.than.html .
3This quote is from Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo Mujo Seppo (The Insentient Preach The Dharma). A translation by Carl Bielefeldt can be found here:https://web.stanford.edu/group/scbs/sztp3/translations/shobogenzo/translations/mujo_seppo/pdf/mujo_seppo-translation.pdf .
4Adittapariyaya Sutta: The Fire Sermon” (SN 35.28), translated from the Pāli by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.Access to Insight (Legacy Edition), 30 November 2013,http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn35/sn35.028.than.html .
5 In this sutta he adds to the eighteen elements an additional six, the six contacts.
6Some might argue that this is accomplished by the scientific method, but I don’t agree. See Steve Hagen’sWhy the World Doesn’t Seem to Make Sense: An Inquiry Into Science, Philosophy and Perception (Sentient Publications, 2013) for an interesting and informed discussion of this point.
7I found the podcast for this program; it is an excellent NPR series called Invisibilia and can be found here (scroll down to the January 29, 2015 episode called “Entanglement”):http://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia
8Here’s a short but very informative little video illuminating the world as seen by humankind’s best friend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7fXa2Occ_U
9Check out this article posted by the University of Bristol School of Biological Sciences if you are interested in this subject:http://www.bristol.ac.uk/biology/research/behaviour/vision/4d.html
10The six sense organs or faculties and their objects.
11Realizing Genjokoan: The Key To Dogen’s Shobogenzo by Shohaku Okumura, p.207 (Wisdom Publications, 2010)
12Our destructive little furry neighbor eventually just quit showing up. My dog Monty and I shewed him away whenever we caught sight of him near the deck, so perhaps the critter simply found a less stressful chewing venue.
13Realizing Genjokoan: The Key To Dogen’s Shobogenzo by Shohaku Okumura, p. 2 (Wisdom Publications, 2010)
14 Crooked Cucumber: The Life and Zen Teachings of Shunryu Suzuki, by David Chadwick, p.301(Broadway Books, 1999).
15. Go (悟) and kaku (覚) are the other two.
|
|