July 2009 — Dibbavana

Across these four talks at the Dibbavana retreat, Mike sets Dogen's teaching against the idea, common in many Buddhist groups, that practice is a climb towards a special goal: as Mike reads him, Dogen says that the state that we are seeking is just the state in zazen, which Mike describes as a balanced, normal state of body and mind rather than a superhuman one. From this he draws the same point about effort, aims and morality: in zazen the aim of our effort is just effort, the centre of Dogen's Buddhism is action in the present moment, and if we practise balance, acting simply and sincerely is, as Mike reads Dogen, not doing wrong.

He sets out from the successful Buddhist centres in Europe, whose structures set up a hierarchy with an enlightened person at the top, calls that picture an illusion and says that Dogen's teachings have no hierarchy of wisdom and rest on the belief that everybody who practises zazen is a Buddha, new or old. The same picture shapes the common belief that enlightenment is attained by constant effort, so that some groups hold very intensive meditation for weeks; Mike calls this attitude a waste of time, saying that ten minutes every day is better than sixteen hours for two weeks. Retelling the story in the Shobogenzo of Daikan Eno, who answered the head monk's poem about constantly polishing the bright mirror of our consciousness with a poem saying that there is no bright mirror, he says that practising zazen is not making an effort to make ourselves better and that the goal of practising zazen is to have no goal. Drawing on what medical science has learned since about 1900, he explains that sitting upright lets the spine lengthen and the nervous system become balanced, so that zazen is a standard method of balancing the body, a nice normal state rather than a spiritual one, and he adds that the essence of Buddhism is so simple that we find it difficult to understand. In the discussion he says that we cannot get rid of ego, since constructing a self is part of being human, but that every time we act sincerely, self and other disappear, and that Buddhist belief is a belief, also a physical one, that what we are experiencing is real.

He says that we can keep our long-term aims while giving up our aim just at this moment, and from his years of mountaineering he concludes that we can move towards our aim by giving up our aim, as footballers say they are not thinking about winning but just playing the match. This attitude of putting ourselves into the present he calls action, gyo in Dogen's teaching, and he says that for Dogen zazen is action, that action is the centre of Buddhism, and that because society values a stockbroker's work above cleaning the toilet, we need a philosophy that says all action is the same. Asked about goals, he says that a goal is only in our mind and is imagination, so that when we reach it the situation is always different, and that although we believe we make our life with our plans, our actions make our life. Asked about Dogen and time, he says that Dogen treats action and time as the same and that in the Uji chapter he has several views, among them that time is existence and that the only real existence is this moment, while what we call time is, in Mike's words, something we construct and share. He reads the ten precepts, which in Japanese say not doing rather than do not, as guidelines that show the limits of our freedom, and notes that Dogen, who wrote them down in the Shobogenzo, also says that if we break them there is no blame and we should just continue. In the chapter Shoaku Makusa, Mike says, Dogen teaches that there is nothing called right waiting somewhere for us to find, and that if we practise balance and act in a balanced way our actions are not doing wrong, which Mike admits sounds too simple and proposes to test in practice, calling the Buddhist way an experiment called life. As he reports Dogen, if we practise zazen, all our mistakes lead us to the truth, and Mike adds that regular zazen does not stop our wobbling but keeps it from becoming extreme, which is the best we can do. He presents Buddhism as a middle way between following what other people do, which he sees in Japan, and the abstract, God-based morality of the West, and he agrees with a participant that decisions based on thinking, such as investing money, still require thinking, while underneath them lies intuition, prajñā, which is balanced when our state is balanced.