August 2012 — Dibbavana

In these four talks from the 2012 Dibbavana retreat, given after almost a year's sabbatical, Mike says that when the fashion, the kind of acting or theatre that Zen has become in the West, is taken away, two things are left: practising zazen, which is waking up, and understanding life, that is, finding explanations that we can believe. He says that zazen is a method to uncover intuition, or prajñā, our basic, natural state, which is different from thinking, and that our lives are also living us. Mike would call Dogen's explanation of the point of Buddhism complete, but he says that Dogen's writings from the 13th century are not enough to live in modern society, so he asks what we should take from other sources. Everything which is written, he says, is written by one person, so we have to imagine the man behind Dogen's words, and he adds that this does not mean making our own meaning in them but reflecting on them, testing Dogen's words out in experience and finding our own words.

He thinks that Nishijima wanted Dogen Sangha to be based on these two things only, and Nishijima said not to try to build a group but not to resist one if it builds. Mike remembers Pavel saying that Dogen Sangha appears when people meet and disappears afterwards, and adds that there is no office, no officers and no uniform. Nishijima disliked hierarchy, yet his Japanese students put him at the top, and Mike says that he is always trying to escape from being at the top himself. Asked how to avoid thinking too much, Mike thinks that the answer is physical activity and that zazen is kind of the simplest sport, which he calls his idea. He says that in sport we notice that we can act intelligently without logical thinking, and in the second talk he suggests that thinking and doing are not separate in the natural world, as when his partner, a potter, makes pots while talking on the telephone. He likes the idea of two kinds of thinking in a book by Professor Kahneman, which he has only heard about, but asks what is different from thinking, and answers with a koan in which a master says that he is thinking, not thinking.

Mike says that Dogen was an aristocrat and an orphan who lived from boyhood only among men in temples, that it seems unlikely that he had a relationship with a woman, and that he guesses Dogen did not have much experience of the ordinary world. He thinks that Dogen's writings, in a way, have something missing for modern people, and guesses that the same is true of everybody who writes about Buddhism, which he says is not a fault, while Dogen, he says, did write something about sex and loving words but never talked in simple human terms about desires, emotions, sex or love. Mike asks whether things such as psychotherapy or Kahneman's book should be part of our understanding of Buddhism and says that he has his own answers but not the answers, while his teacher focused on Dogen alone and he himself is moving more and more towards embracing lots of things. Mike notes that Dogen wrote that one has to leave one's family, and says that he reveres Dogen's teaching but is not going to leave his own, so we have to guess what Dogen meant, and with words such as "have small desire" we have to reflect on what they mean in our own life. He says that he does not tell anyone to stop zazen but that we are free to do anything, and that if we wonder whether stopping would show us the value of zazen, we can wonder for a long time but can't find out the answer. When his hip hurt he stopped for a month, nothing happened except that he thinks he became a bit more irritable, and he started again. He says that he is afraid of freedom, because freedom is only one person alone, and that we don't understand what freedom is: for instance, one can be free even in a prison cell, though he thinks that somebody actually in prison would disagree. He then asks how we can be dependent and also independent at the same time, since we are interdependent beings, and he calls this a central problem in relationships.