July 2009 — Brno

Through the three talks of the Brno weekend retreat runs one idea, that everything has two sides, and Mike uses it to question views that hold on to one side only. What he sets against them is not the better of the two sides but balance in the middle, putting the sacred and the ordinary together and making an effort to be upright rather than good, and with Dogen he keeps both sides in view: that in this moment our action can be free and that we never escape from cause and effect.

In his honest opinion, which he calls only the opinion of a human being, Japanese temple Buddhism separates the sacred from ordinary life, leaves nearly all young monks frustrated by strict discipline and rules written in the 13th century, and has failed as a way of teaching because Japanese people hate zazen. Against it he sets a simple Buddhism of zazen practised regularly at home, for some minutes or half an hour a day, in which ordinary things have a sacred face and sacred things an ordinary face, and he answers the monks' frustration with balanced effort, not trying too hard yet making some effort. Spiritual religions, he thinks, are basically one-sided as well, because they want to keep only the good and get rid of the bad, and Western civilisation has for more than two thousand years been idealistic, making an effort to attain its ideas, with wonderful results, he says, but its idealism is taught so strongly that we do not notice the value of simply acting. The popular idea of karma as a destiny from past lives or as fatalism comes, in his view, from Buddhism mixing with other religions, and Dogen does not believe in it. Science, which we must believe because it works, is something we now believe absolutely, he says, and what a whole society believes absolutely becomes real for it, as when medieval people believed that God saved Brno from the Swedes.

Opposites such as big and small or good and bad are relative and form part of one continuous whole, so Buddhism makes no effort to be good or to stop being bad but makes an effort to be upright, the middle way between them. Mike recalls that Dogen, who as a young monk asked why we need so much effort if we are all Buddha, eventually realised that we make effort just for the sake of making effort, and Mike adds that we do this every day, in many situations, whenever we simply act, for instance by speaking without first thinking what to say. When he turns to cause and effect, he says that Dogen's two views, that in this moment our action can be free and that we never escape from cause and effect, do not fit together, because life is also a puzzle. Since even atomic physics cannot say how one event leads to the next, he suggests that what we take as cause and effect is a kind of belief in process, which is very powerful and works almost all of the time but also causes all our unhappiness, while, as Dogen sees it, reality goes from moment to moment in an unknown way. Belief, he says, depends on whether we lean towards the spiritual or the material side, and if we keep wobbling instead of fixing our evaluation on one side and practise zazen over many years, we form a belief on which we can quietly insist, as Dogen did. Buddhists, he says, are not the only balanced people, but Buddhism is a way to practise balance and to understand how important it is, and for everybody, not only Buddhists, it can, in a way, affirm that making an effort is important, that it is enough simply to act, to move into the future without worrying too much and to accept the good and bad together. He also qualifies these claims: he grants that temples have some value, that rules give us freedom up to a point while from another point of view they suppress it, and that cause and effect is not an illusion.