June 2005 — Lotus Centre

In these four talks from a weekend retreat at the Lotus Centre in Prague, Mike presents Buddhism, as he takes it from Master Dogen and from his own retelling of the Buddha's life, as based on the reality we are having or experiencing now, not on an experience or a perfect state that we hope to reach. For Dogen, as Mike reports, zazen is the centre of Buddhism, and in Mike's telling of Dogen's life, what Dogen at last understood under Master Tendo is that zazen is not getting anything but getting rid of everything. In zazen, Mike says, we do not find a beautiful, peaceful Buddha but we find ourselves, and the perfection we imagine exists only in our mind; he admits that even his own explanation creates such an image.

The same gap between an image in our mind and what really happens runs through what he says about balance: we picture perfect balance as peaceful and wonderful, but if I balance, I have to wobble, like a tightrope walker or a cyclist, and Mike reports that for Dogen zazen is not a fixed posture but a dynamic one. He also says that Dogen describes zazen as a subtle balance between the physical and the mental, in which we concentrate neither on the body nor on thoughts, and he calls the question of how we forget about both the secret of zazen. The passage of Bendowa that Mike reads likewise describes zazen as a practice with no intention of reaching an aim, which balances active and passive and puts the body and mind right, and it speaks of the natural state in which Buddhas do not separate reality into mental and physical. Mike's four viewpoints on zazen come back to these points: zazen is different from thinking, and if we sit for some time our thoughts settle like ash in a glass of water that we stop stirring, and when we sit naturally straight, the two opposing parts of the nervous system can find balance. Then, when we stop splitting ourselves into two, we are naturally one, as when we simply act in sport or in daily life, and in a balanced state we find no barrier between ourselves and the world, which, Mike says, is what Dogen means by oneness with the universe: something more real than a spiritual oneness. The present moment also recurs: one of the four teachings on which, according to Mike, Dogen based his work is that reality is just in this moment, and Dogen recommended practising zazen every day to teach ourselves to be in the present. In Mike's own version of the Buddha's story, the prince is dissatisfied with both material pleasure and spiritual enthusiasm, finds the middle way between these two extremes, and tells his former companions that much of our dissatisfaction comes from wanting to get something and that reality exists not in higher levels of spiritual consciousness but here and now. In the four views, which Mike says Dogen uses to look at everything, Mike contrasts the two Western views, that ideas or material things are the basis of existence, with the Buddhist view that the basis of our existence is our action, here and now.

Again and again Mike treats this teaching as practical rather than theoretical or mystical: young Dogen's question, why we need to study so hard if we are all perfect, was very practical while the Tendai monks were very theoretical, and Eisai shocked him with a realistic answer, that he could see real cats and real cows. Shobogenzo, he says, matters because in it Dogen writes the whole of Buddhist philosophy and practice in a consistent way, and what Dogen talks about is not theoretical or strange or mystical, although it takes great effort to understand because of medieval Japanese, Dogen's games with words and the distance of a thousand years. Asked why Dogen explained so many complicated matters, he says that Dogen's teachings are not difficult but reality is very complicated, that Dogen spoke in a thirteenth-century paradigm which takes time to understand, and that we have to keep feeling puzzled without giving up. Many people, he adds, do not want to hear about reality, which is too boring, too simple and too severe, and they prefer the idea of a better person to the person in front of them. Pointing out that people in thirteenth-century Japan needed hygiene, rules for living and philosophy, Mike says that when we think about what to teach about Dogen in the modern world, we need to look realistically at what people need, and that to spread Buddhism in modern society we have to look at modern society. His advice on practice is just as plain: his master said that it is more important to practise regularly every day than very intensely for a week or ten days, because there is nothing to get, and Mike says that he does not compare his zazen but just does it every day.