"If you want to become a Buddha by sitting, know that Buddha has no fixed form...If you try to become a Buddha by sitting, you are killing Buddha. If you attach to the form of sitting, you can never attain Buddhahood."
Zen Master NangakuI've been pondering on meditation practice lately. Why on earth do I do it? What do I think its all in aid of? What relationship is there between meditation practice and the true nature of reality? Here are a few non definitive ruminations.
Practice with Self Improvement in mind
The fact that we even call it 'practice' presents us with the idea that its a preparatory exercise, similar to a sports or music practice. To get better at doing something, we rehearse or exercise ourselves, through repeating an action, word or thought over and over. People go to the gym for a broad range of reasons; to stay fit, achieve perfect abbs, to get a girlfriend, to be more mentally and physically resilient. Likewise people meditate with differing motives, because it helps us to stay mentally fit, to be a kinder person, a more mindful person, a more integrated or equanimous person, etc. And it can indeed be beneficial in this way, like a form of mental therapy session.
On a day to day practical level a meditation practice can help you cope better with oneself, with others or with life in general. Which is a good thing. But is meditation solely a utilitarian practice, like a pill we take to make life that bit more bearable? Well, it can be used in that way. But only up to a point. In the early days of learning to meditate, it can be helpful to have goal in mind. Otherwise why would you want to learn to do it in the first place?
Practice with a spiritual aspiration in mind.
Once you introduce a spiritual aspiration into why you meditate, such as getting into higher states of consciousness or reaching enlightenment, then this attracts our ego to it like a magnet. Quickly becoming the overarching goal to which all our spiritual practice is directed towards achieving. Practice can be useful as a preparation ritual for getting to enlightenment. But that goal lies somewhere in our imagination up the top of a very steep slope. My experience is that meditation slowly and subtly re-orientate you, there is a change in your sense of yourself and relations with others. This, so it is said, can progressively deepen to become a much more fundamental thing than just being a nicer person to hang out with. But I've had little experience of that.
I've certainly had periods when the reason why I meditated was driven by an aspiration, not always that clearly focused, to achieve some anticipated prelude to a higher state of consciousness. I did have a few peak experiences with meditation. Those were relatively early on, and they are best put down to 'beginners mind'. Then it all went quiet, and stayed quiet on that front, which as the decades clocked up I did find quite dispiriting. It was a though the more I aspired to climb higher the more the fog swept in. Is meditation then a practice best left without a conscious destination?
Practice without a spiritual aspiration in mind
Can you practice without any conception of what you're meditating for? Is that even realistic? Out of a lack of confidence I, like many folk, often needed encouragement and reassurance. A tangible sense of making progress through my practice, meditative or otherwise. Once I realised that even my theoretical goals and meditative aspirations were turning into an obstacle, I tried gently pulling my attention away from them or preventing them arising in the first place. That's a bit like trying to not think of pink elephants - for then you become besieged by them, you see them everywhere. Low and behold new goals are created out of even 'not having goals and aspirations.' In my experience its not possible to practice without some sort of 'gaining idea' lying prone behind it like a succubus, however subtle or unconscious that notion may be. Its also difficult to unlearn one's early bad habits. Once you've learnt how to ride a bike hands free, you never really forget. Even if as you get older it becomes less and less advisable.
Purpose and meditation can develop this problematical relationship. One that doesn't help on a day to day basis to keep practicing. I've learnt to accept my mind will move from one mistaken misconception to another. Interspersed with slim moments of insight or clarity in which I vaguely sense where the way out is. Even trying 'to be present' is an aim. Amid all the uncertainty about what 'to be present' actually is, or would feel like. What if 'to be present' is the very antithesis of knowing? I began doing a 'just sitting' practice initially in an attempt to stop my mind behaving as though it had a spiritual addiction. Constantly on the look out for signs of dhyana etc etc. But over time it became clear that it was better to let go of even that. To adopt Uchiyama Roshi's approach, to ' Open the Hand of Thought' whenever the mind grasps at any idea, to gently prise those fingers away from that delicious chocolate bar. This was just the start of a unending process of retraining. To not voluntarily enable my mind to act as the driver of everything.
Practice / Enlightenment.
Dogen has his own take on the purpose of practice, which I personally find I'm quite drawn to. In his early years as a monk he had a 'great doubt' about what the purpose of practice was in light of the concept of Buddha Nature. Which essentially says you are already Enlightened but do not recognise it, or consciously know it. If this was so, then what was the point of practice? Didn't Buddha Nature make any conscious purpose for practice entirely redundant? His resolution of his dilemma was that practice is enlightenment, and enlightenment - practice, indivisibly. Even the Buddha once he became enlightened never said - 'now that jobs done, I don't need to carry on meditating, thank god for that!
If you go a few posts back in this blog and read a quote I posted by Shohaku Okamura, called We Are Part of It. He explains quite beautifully what our relationship to sound is. We think hearing is something we do, its a response we have. Something we observe or experience as happening separate from the world outside of us. We see ourselves as producing it. When in fact, because of interconnectivity and the conditioned co-production of it all, its the result of a whole host of things of which we are only one smallish part. Sound is a natural interactive production of the entire universe.
In a similar manner, we believe that we decide to meditate, that meditation is something we action and direct. It maybe that actually we are responding to a whole host of conditions in us and in the universe that support spiritual practice. That impulse Dogen would say emanates from Buddha Nature, from the state of enlightenment, of reality as it really is. Buddha Nature is present according to Dogen's presentation, not just in humankind, but in everything, whether sentient or not. His conception of it is similar to that of the Tao, if you can name it, then that's not it, not Buddha Nature. Though its emerging all the time through everything, including through our practice. An urge in the universe to transcend, that feeds into the desire to practice. Practice appears to be an interactive production of the entire universe.
Practice as Practice
If practice is a natural production of the entire universe, then when we do meditate, we would be meditating with all beings, for all beings, in all time periods. Meditation would no longer be just ours, just for us. Interconnected with everyone else's lives, meditation and practice in general, whether in the present or the past or the future. Well that would be a Bodhisattva activity, for the benefit of all beings.
Practice on the meditation cushion would be less and less about doing. Not just 'not doing' either, just being, just sitting, just letting go of preconceptions, expectations and desires, just thoughts and ideas floating through your mind without comment. Not a means to anything, not an actualisation, not a manifestation. No meaning other than in the doing of it. No purpose other than in the doing of it. No conceptualisation. No elaborate religious framework to surround, hold up or explain how and why you do it. This is practise as practice. To adapt one of Sangharaskshita's aphorisms - Commitment to practice is primary, lifestyle and doctrinal rectitude are secondary.
Perhaps it doesn't matter what form a practice takes. Whether formal or informal, traditional or experimental, with or without a godhead in mind. As long as we practice devotedly, with a sincere and open heart. Its perfectly possible for the meaning and purpose of a practice to be entirely misconceived, but still be an effective practice. As Zen keeps reminding us, in the end the ineffable 'whatever' exists outside of words and scripture.
Just Do It
Ultimately, following Dogen's idea further, if practice-enlightenment is present in everything, Enlightenment is everywhere, so is practice too. Whilst I might not have a clue how that might happen, nor how I might connect with practice being everywhere in everything, it opens up a way of doing meditation that is not entirely dependent on the specificity of a practice.
Somemes its helpful to know what the possible theoretical framework is. Yet frames can either enhance or detract from the picture in them. Quite often frameworks attract far too much attention to themselves. But to be honest there are mornings when meditation is simply there to hold me together. Anything else is a nice fairytale.
Practice generally, well it still feels to me to be about doing something, going somewhere, a sense for a destination activated by following a path. It maybe that this is some form of emotional or existential need to fill in the void over the purpose of life. But what if doing the very opposite of that is what we need to do, to calmly face that void through practice.
Perhaps, everything might be a lot easier should I stop fretting or cogitating about practice. How much more effective it might be then. Not even think about if what I'm doing is right or wrong. Get out of my head and onto the meditation stool. Do whatever is working right now. Be confident that is enough. Just do it.
"Be sure to detach yourself from all your clingings.
Be sure not to attach yourself to your non-clinging either"
An old Chinese Chan Master saying.
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