September 2013 — Banský Studenec

In a public talk and four retreat talks, Mike presents the Buddhist teaching he found in Japan, above all in Dogen's writings, not as a religion or a special attainment but as a simple, realistic way to live that is very difficult to practise: life is only here and now, everything we do has a result, and it is not necessary to think before we act. Across the series he keeps returning to the teaching that the aim of Buddhism is not to separate: the mental and the physical are the same thing, physical action has intelligence, and neither zazen nor the truth of Buddhism is something special set apart from our real life.

Following Dogen, he says that life is only here and now but that whatever we do gets a result without any exception, so we need to concentrate on what we are doing now, which is very simple and, especially in the modern technological world, very difficult. In Japan he learned that this cause and effect carries no moral judgement, only simple fact, which he found comforting after the Christian idea of sin and punishment he had carried deep inside him, and he reads the Buddhist precepts not as rules but as signposts showing what disturbs ourselves and other people. Prajñā, which he explains as before knowledge or before thinking, is for him a kind of intuition that we all have and that tells us what to do before we clearly think about it; little children have lots of it, but school and socialisation cover it up. He is not against sending children to school, and he grants that society does not work without thinking, but in the West thinking before acting has become much more important than acting before thinking, and if we are brought up to think about everything before we act, we are imprisoned by our brain. We cannot make our intuition stronger by thinking about it, but we can take away what lies on top of it: he describes Dogen's dropping off body and mind in zazen as taking off our ambition, pride and masks and putting them back on if we want, so that we get to know them, and in zazen we can return to our natural state, not a special state but a simple one. Zazen is for him one way, not the only one, to balance ourselves so that we stop separating ourselves and feel whole, and Dogen, he says, speaks of many other practices of balance, while the idea that zazen is a special way to become an enlightened Buddhist he calls rubbish.

Attaining the truth, too, is not the special, spiritual thing it sounds like in English: when an old master answers the question about the truth of Buddhism with “Have a cup of tea”, he points to a real act in the present moment, and in the end the truth of Buddhism is something very simple, to be able to express your real self in your real life, speaking from somewhere inside rather than from a clever brain. Not separating also means, he says, accepting our goodness and our badness, our strengths and our weaknesses, and what we hide pops out again like a cork pushed under water; after a heart operation he too had to accept his depression and anger. Nobody can give us the truth, he says, because we already have it underneath; it does not belong to Buddhism or to any group, transmission of Dharma is not a way of evaluating people but can be an affirmation, and projecting everything onto a perfect teacher does not really help anybody. He reads the Heart Sutra, which speaks of the practice of prajñā paramita, as a teaching about zazen: the labels we give things have no separate existence, in zazen we realise that reality is beyond our labels, and in his reading the sutra does not deny death but says that real death is different from the word death. We only make models of the world, he says, and even Buddhism's model of becoming balanced through zazen and acting without thinking is only a model, a finger pointing at the moon, just as in the public talk he says that even what he is saying about the teaching is not true: reality is not so simple. Old Buddhist writings full of legendary Buddhas, gods and demons are, he suggests, best read if we make our own life the basis: Buddhism is realistic and about life here and now, so what an ancient author wrote must have a simple meaning, and if we cannot find it, we can close the book; we find ourselves not in books but in zazen, which Dogen describes as sitting with ourselves and facing ourselves, and once we find ourselves, we can understand which books are valuable. Our habit of separating intelligence and physical action he calls very wrong, because physical action has intelligence, as in a spider which, he likes to think, is very intelligent but is not thinking, just doing. Since Buddhist teachers keep saying that the mind and the body are the same thing, and doing something fully, without thinking about it consciously, brings a feeling of completeness, the model of the brain controlling the body is not enough for him, though he grants that a participant who objects to the spider comparison is not wrong, adds that “we are not right” and says that we must accept the findings of science while remembering that they are models.