June 2007 — Padmafarma

Across these three talks at the Padma Farm retreat, Mike repeatedly directs attention to what is simply here, alongside the pictures, abstractions and plans that he says we also need: in zazen, as he retells Dogen's realisation, we are not trying to get anything but to let everything drop away, and the koan stories he reads show that we can never escape from being here and now. He describes becoming a Buddhist teacher as following a life that he never planned, and he says that he has no interest in complicated Buddhist theories.

In Talk 1 he explains Dogen's phrase shinjin datsuraku, dropping off heart, mind and body, as stopping holding on rather than pushing away, and he says that because humans can think, we make pictures that differ from the way things are, which he calls extremely important for civilisation but a cause of unhappiness when we take the picture for reality. In zazen we practise throwing such pictures away, he says, but not in normal life, so the point is to notice the difference between our images and what is in front of us. Real zazen is not like the image of dropping everything off but a kind of wobbling, in which we always pass through the middle, a state that he says is in our zazen even the first time and that we notice more clearly if we practise regularly. In Talk 3 he says that koan stories are not strange stories to think about during zazen in order to reach a special state, and that Master Dogen, who collected three hundred of them, thought that reading and studying them lets us understand something about Buddha's teaching. The three stories he reads, about a master tracing a circle in the air, a master spreading his arms and a treasure found by entering the Buddha hall with a lantern, all point, he says, to something very simple: nobody has ever been anywhere but here and now, and in the centre of our simple activities lies something valuable that we do not notice.

In both Talk 1 and Talk 3 he does not reject thinking: throwing away our creativity in our jobs could be disastrous, he says in Talk 1, and in Talk 3 that being abstract is not wrong, since without it we would have no culture, so what matters is noticing what is happening at this moment. In Talk 4 he tells how he went to a seminar on Zen with a little Japanese monk in nineteen seventy-seven, kept going for about fifteen years without knowing why, took the precepts without knowing what they were, and helped his teacher to translate books about Master Dogen, so that how he became a teacher is, he says, a kind of puzzle: he made choices, but he had no plan. He says that in normal life we decide by thinking and talking, but that underneath, his life is flowing forward and he is following it without knowing where it is going, and that, although he says he should not make recommendations, he would like to suggest that we practise zazen, every day if we can, or whenever we can, and follow the stream of our life. In line with Talk 1, where zazen is a wobbling about a balance point, he says that the Buddhist way comes from balance rather than from getting knowledge, although knowledge and talking are important too. Because Buddhism came together with different cultures, he says, each of us has to find out what is culture and what is Buddhism by comparing what is taught with our own life, since nobody knows the result. When a participant objects that anybody starting to teach seems to go against a precept, Mike answers that his teacher meant that waiting until we feel ready is too late, and he adds that people are free to start teaching and that those who listen can decide whether they want to hear them. He is open about the limits of explaining: in Talk 1 he can neither explain nor prove how noticing who we really are changes us, so we can only believe it, and in Talk 4 he says that if he does not feel confident that he is telling the truth, he cannot continue. He also says in Talk 1 that zazen shows us when we are sleepy, tense or miserable and changes us only very slowly, and in Talk 3 that the treasure must be present in simple activities such as walking to the coffee machine, which we feel but do not notice.