September 2009 — Earth Spirit

Across these three talks from the 2009 sesshin at Earth Spirit, Mike sets out to say clearly how the Buddhism he learned from Nishijima differs from other forms of Buddhism: what he wants is a Buddhism free from ‘Buddhism’, in which zazen and the practices that go with it work in modern life with modern people. In his view Buddhism has been hijacked by academics, who tell us what Buddhists in the past said and did, and by religious groups, which treat it as a spiritual path to bliss under someone who knows the secret, while the place to look is not away from here but right here in our own experience, which is for him the essence of Dogen’s teachings. He calls this attitude a small and possibly unsuccessful revolution, and it does not reject ceremonies, symbols or other people’s approaches as valueless: they have value in human society, but giving ceremonies and symbols a special sacred meaning instead of seeing them realistically is, in his view, a mistake.

Even Dogen, he says, has to be read critically: he was a thirteenth-century poet who wrote practical rules to teach a rough group of young monks how to live together, not metaphors for life, and rather than putting ourselves into his life we have to put ourselves into our own life in front of us, using our own terms and concepts. Mike tests the difference on one of the koan stories Dogen collected, in which Yunmen says that a treasure hidden in this heap of flesh holds up the lantern, goes inside the Buddha Hall and brings the monastery gate to the top of the lantern, and on John Daido Loori’s commentary, which says that the last line cannot be discussed and invites the reader to trust and enter the mystery. He grants that we can read the story as a metaphor for something ineffable and feel a sense of wonder if we choose to think like that, but he asks whether we want mystical interpretations of Buddhist stories or realistic interpretations which we search for in our own experience. In his own reading, the old monk Yunmen is hanging lanterns at night, as in a Japanese monastery, and as he walks across the gravel towards the temple gate, the gate, lit by the lantern on his staff, seems to come up to the top of the staff; doing this fully, he notices that there is something very valuable in a bag of skin, that he is alive and acting, so what the story describes is just his everyday life, not a metaphor or a spiritual essence. What decides which reading we prefer, he suggests, is where we look for reality – in the mystery of the universe or the spiritual world, in the physical world, for instance in science alone, or somewhere else – and he says he used the story to show how our interpretations are influenced by our own preferences, not to claim that his group alone is right. Yet, to laughter, he calls the view that no approach is right or wrong completely wrong and holds that it is necessary to fight for what describes something real for us, while other people can do what they like.

Turning to the symbols of his own dharma transmission from Nishijima, Mike unpacks a stick, a whisk and a silk certificate and calls such things empty trappings: a piece of wood, some horse hair and some silk that we invest with meaning, as a keen footballer would invest Maradona’s boots with something although they are only boots. The certificate lists his ancestors back to Shakyamuni, and for him ‘authentic’ simply means a list to which you add your name at the bottom and which you pass on to someone who practises zazen as part of their life. The state it speaks of is one in which we prefer a realistic way of looking at things to a spiritual or an overly materialistic one, so whoever says of the old monk that he is just hanging up the lantern can add their name to the list. Chanting the Hannya Shingyo or bowing in the dojo is, for him, a simple ritual that is nice to do, but nothing in the chant itself gives us anything spiritual that singing something else would not; when a person chants, something real happens in that meeting, and its value lies in what is happening now. This does not mean that nothing is sacred for him: he feels that the sacred and the ordinary are two sides of one thing, which are not separated when we are present and acting, and when a participant speaks of reverence and awe under the night sky, he answers that they are there for everybody and that we do not need Buddhism to tell us so. He warns that groups built on spiritual hierarchy tend to lead people to hand their own responsibility to a perfect individual, and he even asks whether he too sets up a hierarchy by giving his answer from his seat. His certificate, he says, gives him nothing but a piece of silk onto which he himself projects the authority, the proof of a teacher lies in what the person is like, and he feels that the vertical hierarchy that has come over from Japan into Zen is quite counterproductive to understanding what Buddhism has to offer. The simple point behind the koan stories, he says, is that reality is just here, now, and in an increasingly virtual society this is vital, because without concentrating on the ceremony of washing our face and cleaning our teeth we cannot live properly.