June 2006 — Padmafarma

Across these three talks at a retreat at Padma Farm, Mike presents what he takes from Dogen as stressing doing something instead of thinking about something, with zazen practised not to reach a perfect state but to stop what pulls us apart. In each talk he sets a picture we hold in our heads against what happens in practice: real balance is wobbling, right and wrong exist in our action, and the qualities of a great person are what comes from practising zazen, not a perfect image to copy. He says that words always create very perfect pictures and admits that his own descriptions can sound too perfect or too easy, and he adds that practising zazen regularly lets us notice this for ourselves.

Starting from the question of what Buddhism is apart from robes and incense, he describes it through four aspects that he finds in Dogen, one of them being active, which he reads simply as doing something instead of thinking about something. He accepts that human society is a construction built on thinking and planning, and that this is necessary, but says it sometimes costs us our freedom, which we rediscover by acting, as in sport, and he tells of a master who answers a student's question about the essence of Buddhism with "Wash your bowl up", meaning don't think, act. The same turn from idea to action shapes his account of right and wrong: according to Dogen, as Mike reports it, there is nothing called right waiting somewhere to be found, and Mike adds that in Buddhism what we do matters more than what we believe. The basis of doing right, according to Dogen as Mike reports it, is not a moral, intellectual decision but a decision we make intuitively with our body and mind. Asked about emotions entering a decision, he says that in a real situation no recommendation is any good, and asked about past mistakes, he says that we can forgive ourselves, since anger about them changes nothing.

Zazen is the practice behind all this: it balances body and mind, between the active and the passive half of the nervous system or in the sitting posture, and as Mike reads Dogen, the oneness of body and mind is not something we make but something that returns when we stop making it two. He calls zazen a practice not to get something but a practice to lose something, taking off what we pile on ourselves until our natural self is left. In the last talk he says that we do not need to try to be like the image of a great person, only to stop being something else, like water in a glass that settles when we stop stirring it. Being balanced does not mean being free of emotion, since emotions keep coming like a current and with zazen we wobble instead of swinging between very happy and very depressed. The last talk applies this to Dogen's last chapter, in which Mike renders eight truths of a great person that he says Dogen presents as truths of a person who practises zazen. They run from small desire, which we should not try to make zero, through satisfaction, tranquillity, diligence, mindfulness and the balanced state of dhyāna to wisdom and not engaging in idle chat. He reads tranquillity not as leaving other people but as being alone in the group while keeping our independence and, as he also did in the second talk for right and wrong, uses the Japanese habit of following the group as a contrast, wondering whether the West suffers from the opposite problem of being very individual. Mindfulness means for him concentrating completely on what we are doing rather than watching ourselves, and wisdom, prajñā, means something intuitive before thought that shows in small decisions, such as crossing the road for no reason, which make the path of our life. In the first two talks, he explains that what sounds spiritual in Dogen, such as becoming one with the universe or doing no wrong, is meant in a very simple, practical way, which we can come to realise through regular practice. His advice is modest: regularity in getting up and going to bed, and ten or five minutes of zazen every day, which may be better than a promised thirty minutes that is gone by Friday; the Buddha's image of diligence, as Mike renders it, is a small stream wearing a hole in a rock, and Mike adds that we need to keep going step by step.