July 2021 — Skalní fara

Across these five talks from the sesshin at Skalní fara, Mike presents zazen not as meditation or a way to get a special state but as sitting in balance, a very simple practice in which at times, even if only for a minute, we step outside the shared trance of ideas and beliefs in which we live. He asks us to practise balance every day and not to make it special, and, following Dogen's teachings as he understands them, he grounds both our decisions, which he says are made by prajñā, and our morality in being balanced rather than in thinking or rules, although he grants that we still need to think about our decisions. Stepping out of the trance does not mean escaping to live somewhere else, however: we cannot live in reality, he says, and the truth is to realise that we live here and to be able to move between the two.

Civilisation, in Mike's own explanation, is a creation of the human mind, and the same ability that creates it also traps us in a kind of dream or prison, a trance; while we stay inside it, the power of its ideas and beliefs is so strong that we cannot see the real situation. Coming away, as the first sangha did in the forest and as we do in a sesshin, may be, he says, the simplest way to see what is going on, although, unlike in Dogen's time, we no longer need to leave family life permanently but can come out sometimes and then go back. When we are just sitting, the floor in front is the floor in front and nothing is special, and noticing, as we keep going back into the trance and coming out again, that this trance is where we live most of the time is what he calls finding the truth; if we can notice how stupid and deluded we are, and must be because we are human, that, he says, is enlightenment. He also asks us to let go of our viewpoints at every moment, as in the mountains, where the view keeps changing; when people share and fix the same viewpoint, he says, we call it a belief, and he reads Nagarjuna's praise of the Buddha for advising us to let go of all viewpoints not as having no opinion but as letting go again at every moment. Our life, too, is only a story, which we need and can only live in, so the point, he says, is not to get rid of the story but to accept it.

Zazen, as his teacher Nishijima Roshi insisted, is sitting in the balanced state, which Mike describes as a dynamic practice, as much physical as mental or spiritual, in which over the years we find an area between being lost inside ourselves and focusing on our body, where we see just what is in front of us and the experience is completely normal. Because real balance is wobbling around, as when a child learns to ride a bicycle, we are in the balanced state as long as we practise zazen, sitting in balance and doing the best we can. Prajñā, which Mike explains as what comes before thinking, does not mean knowledge for him and is not a thing that we have or do not have, but according to Dogen it is developed by practising zazen and other activities that make us balanced, and when we develop it, it becomes, if you like, part of our body-mind. Because, as Buddhism states, the physical and the mental are two sides of one thing, Mike thinks it is important for people who search for the truth to be aware of science: the biologists Maturana and Varela suggested that life and intelligence emerge from a cell made of parts that are not alive, so that life itself is intelligent, and his teacher explained that sitting in balance in zazen balances the autonomic nervous system. Just as intelligence is in the cell, he says, according to Dogen's teachings morality is in our conduct: instead of making rules about right and wrong and following them by thinking, if we balance ourselves we can do no wrong, which for Mike means acting in the best way we can as human beings, though not perfectly, and morality is, if you like, an emergent property of what we do. So we do not need to try to be compassionate, he says, we just need to be balanced, and he thinks that the widespread teachings about developing compassion are a kind of waste of time, although every human being can show compassion. Not making practice special means, for Mike, sitting every day, also when we are tired or the children are making a noise; the real rituals, he says, are getting up in the morning, washing our face and going to work, and the original Buddha was teaching how to live, not ritual. Over many years, he says, daily practice steers our life through subtle decisions we probably do not notice, and he thinks, though he cannot say scientifically that it is true, that zazen may be why his life has brought him to giving talks on Dogen in the Czech Republic. Because what we have done cannot be changed, he recommends affirming what we do and saying that we did our best, which is not the same as being sure that we are never wrong. In two of the talks he adds that, as Dogen says, we have to find out what the words of the teachings mean in our own experience, because in the sense of the Buddhist teachings, to know means to have real experience, not knowledge.