SACRED MOMENTS - The Blue Mountains Walking

'Twirling flowers are twirled by eyes, twirled by mind consciousness, twirled by nostrils, and twirled by flowers twirling. Every Buddha's practice,experience, and maintenance of the truth, twirls flowers to dance like butterflies in the spring wind.' #

Three of four years on from my having left London, it is the early 1990's. I'm living in Diss, Norfolk, running my own art shop there. Once a week I'd go to Norwich Buddhist Centre for an evening of practice and a talk. I'd travel up early and return on the last train. Invariably it turned into a very long evening, where I frequently would not get back home to Diss until well gone midnight. 

'Your practice as a descendant of yourself is endless'+

Despite this journey, I began attending the centre once, twice and occasionally thrice a week. Buddhism provided, not only a warm welcoming context, but a creative way of working with, for want of a better phrase 'all too familiar disquieting issues'.

'Understanding through faith is that which we cannot evade'+

On this particular night at the Buddhist Centre there was a compendium of short talks given by three people, on the connections between their work and Buddhist practice. I can only remember the content of one of those talks. because in that twenty minutes I was introduced to the writings of Eihei Dogen. And a lifetimes worth of love, affinity and inspired personal practice began.

'Flowers fall amid our longing and weeds spring up amid our antipathy'**

Any concept of 'soul' is in danger of being misleading. Particularly if you imagine it having an eternal persistence. Yet I believe the word 'soul' still has its uses. Soul for me, is a cover all term for a feeling for the totality of who we presently are. When that 'soul' connects with 'the vision and reality of the way things really are" it brings a sense of the sacred forth. When we sense the sacred in our experience, its because ultimate reality has been made conscious through an occurance in the present moment. These sacred moments can occur via anything, anywhere, anytime. They fill us with a sense of reality that is much bigger than just us and our individual being. That is why they are able to affect us. We recognise 'soulful' language when we hear, read or feel it. Words that bristle the hairs on your head, with a brief frisson of recognition. And sometimes, just sometimes, I can return to them regularly for continuing sustenance and a recharge.

'It is vital that we clarify and harmonise our lives with our work and not lose sight of either the absolute or the practical.'*

So in this short talk, the speaker was expressing in words their enthusiasm for Dogen's most well known and popular text - The Instructions to the Tenzo. In it Dogen playfully oscillates between practical tasks and profound interpretation. It's clear he saw no real distinction to be made here between the two. Dogen's ability to imply both perspectives simultaneously is, in my experience, quite unique to him. I've frequently found this exhilarating to engage with, the occasional emanations of bliss can result. A quality buried like a hidden treasure within his writing, captures something I've long been in search of.

'Be very clear about this; A fool sees himself as another, but a wise man sees others as himself'*

Now Dogen would most likely be extremely skeptical or even scathing of the use of words like 'soul' or 'the sacred'. But then he was like that about most language. He knew language had the power to mislead, to artificially reify what was really only a transitory useful concept. Yet he too was willing to exploit 'soulful' language, because he recognised its ability to suggestively place you within touching distance of the potential for Buddhahood, the sublime, the sacred. Imaginative language, however flawed, can nudge you in the right direction.

'A simple green has the power to become the practice of the Buddha, quite adequately nurturing the desire to live out the Way. Never feel aversion toward plain ingredients. As a teacher of men and of heavenly beings, make the best of whatever greens you have.*

There are far too many Dogen quotes over the years that have touched me in a similar way since then. That is why his writing has maintained itself as a major strand of inspiration in my spiritual practice. One I return to when ever my faith stumbles or becomes a little too arid. Once the enthusiasm was lit, I was off, reading as much Dogen as I could find. This is what soulful language can do, it can propel you on journeys of exploration. Inevitably that led me to Dogen,'s major philosophical work - The Shobogenzo, and to The Mountains & Rivers Sutra in particular.

Dogen was a skilled refined poet, who typically decried skilled refined poetry. You could say that he revelled in confounding his own contradictions. So you will find many rich poetic metaphors mischievously being played around with in The Mountains & Rivers Sutra. For Dogen language was not limited in its ability to express the ineffable, but imaginatively inexhaustible. Over the years I've compiled a number of Shobogenzo Pujas ( devotional rituals) of differing length. The Short Morning version I currently use quite regularly, concludes with these edited verses from The Mountains & Rivers Sutra. They contain a powerful metaphor of walking, as both an individual and a cosmic transcendental act.

'The walking of mountains 

is like the walking of human beings.

The walking of the Blue Mountains 

is swifter than the wind,
human beings in the mountains 

do not sense it or know it.
Being in the mountains
describes the opening of flowers 

in the real world.

People out of the mountains
never sense it and never know it,
people who have no eyes to see the mountains
do not sense, do not know, do not see,
and do not hear this concrete fact.

If we doubt the walking of the mountains,
we also do not yet know our own walking.
It is not that we do not have our own walking,
but we do not yet know
and have not yet clarified our own walking.

When we know our own walking,
then we will surely also know
the walking of the Blue Mountains'***

This need to 'clarify your own walking' encapsulates the vision I hold for what my spiritual life will forever be about. To walk with the Blue Mountains. For those in the mountains, walking in nature, climbing to the top of mountains can be a transcendent experience in and of itself. To reach a higher perspective where you can look down on the low valleys beneath. Only from such an elevated viewpoint can you begin to see the world for what it really is. The Blue Mountains walking appears as this unknowable realm of perception, until at some point we find that 'our own walking' comes into sacred alignment with it.

* Extract from Dogen's The Zen Kitchen To Enlightenment, Trans. Thomas Wright. Pub.Weatherhill.

** Extract from Dogen's Genjo Koan, Trans, Paul Jaffe, Pub. Shambhala

*** Extract from the Ch 14 Sansuigo, The Shobogenzo by Dogen.
Trans, Nishijima & Cross, Pub. Windbell.

+ Textual origins of these Dogen quotation lost.

# Extract from The Udumbara Flower, The Shobogenzo, Trans, Nishijima & Cross.  Pub. Windbell.