August 2014 — Banský Studenec

In the first two of these three talks from the sesshin in Banský Studenec, Mike returns to the difference between ideas and action, saying that in Dogen's teaching right is not an idea waiting for somebody to do it but exists in what we do. As Mike presents it, our action does not follow from what we think we should do but from our state of body and mind, which is right when body and mind are balanced, and zazen is the simplest standard way of balancing them, although many activities bring balance. He says it seems that some Greek philosophers developed the idea of a perfect, abstract world of forms. He says that the basic view of Western civilisation was formed when this met the Christian belief in a perfect world called heaven, and that the problem we face in understanding Buddhism is that we are all wearing European glasses, which took him and Gabriele many years to take off while studying with their teacher Nishijima Roshi.

To show the difference between ideas and action he reads a story from Dogen's chapter on doing right and not doing wrong, in which a master tells an official that the great intention of the Buddha Dharma is not to commit wrong and to do the many kinds of right; even a child of three can say it, the official remarks, and the master replies that a child of three can speak the truth but an old man of eighty cannot practise it. Mike takes this as pointing out the difference between what we say, think and write and what we do, which he says is becoming very difficult to notice in modern society, where after watching a programme about a place we never visited we may talk about it as if we had been there; this is not wrong, he says, but should be noticed. He does not think society can stop thinking or that we can have blank minds, and says that very strong ideas or beliefs forced into reality might end in fighting; what is important is to notice the real situation: not to make ourselves into some special Buddhist but to notice that we are ordinary people and how big the gap is between the world of ideas and our actual actions. He recalls being horrified, when he went to live in Japan, that the Japanese instructors he worked with did not want to plan where they were going, but after nearly ten years he started to accept their way of making a little plan, doing something and changing the plan, noticing a very deep difference between his culture and the Japanese culture, and he thinks this difference allowed countries in the Far East to accept and practise Buddhism, though he does not mean that the Eastern civilisations were superior. In Japan, he says, someone who wants to become a potter or to make beautiful wooden bowls studies with a master for maybe ten years, but people in our culture who are told to study Buddhism for ten years are horrified, so society is forgetting the traditional way of learning. He also names two steps: to start to practise zazen and to find a teacher who knows what it's like without any glasses on.

In the third talk he describes that way of learning as finding a teacher, a real person rather than a book, a theory, an idea or any programme, and learning everything the teacher has, good and bad, like and dislike, for many years, which he calls a very ancient way of learning, completely different from how we learn so many things in modern life. He says that he, and he is sure Gabriele too, doubted many times, yet in the end he accepted everything the teacher said, which may be stupid, he says, but for him it works completely; replying to remarks in the discussion, he adds that finding a teacher and learning everything from them does not mean you have to like them or do what they say. The Buddhist way is not the only way to live, he says, and following it does not mean being a monk or withdrawing from society, since it is not about the things we do but how we live. On simplicity he says that their line of Buddhism does not come from the mental aspect and that they found by experience that practice gives us mental simplicity, not working on the mind to make the mind simple, and the teaching is to work on the body mind through zazen, healthy eating, exercise and balance. The simplicity he means is not simplicity without any possessions, nor one in which we get rid of all our desires, and we do not need to be afraid to be simple, although it is a bit scary. Modern psychology, he says, is very effective: he trained as a psychotherapist in the 1970s, practised for seven or eight years and later attended a psychotherapist for nearly two years, which he found very helpful, so he sees no need, if you live a Buddhist life, to deny the value of understanding ourselves. Buddhism says to believe in reality, in this world, this life, not in something spiritual or something material, he says, and in the first talk he closes by saying that in Dogen's teaching right is not an abstraction, whereas for us in Christian cultures and in modern society it is, and we measure our action against the abstract.