ARTICLE- One Singular Creation

As human beings we make judgements based on our perceptions. In most cases these are self referential, about what is me and what is not me, these are my people and these are not my people. Such distinctions are inherently prejudicial. We prefer and desire pleasure, happiness and joy, and don't want anything that might usher in their opposites. All our primary likes and dislikes, are built upon dualities - Me & You, Self & Other, Good & Evil, Love & Hate, War & Peace, Pleasure & Pain, Beauty & Ugliness.

These are themselves surrogates for the primary human experience of Life & Death. All things appear and disappear, are born and then die. Our capacity to love is predicated upon it, we hate it when things disappoint, disappear or die. We become easily attached to particular circumstances that when they change we feel emotionally robbed, we are bereft, we grieve, we mourn their loss, we get angry, we are in denial, we become depressed etc.

Our human tendency to take everything that happens to us in relation to the external world extremely personally, is the primary source of our mental suffering. Modelling our experience around a range of dualities, causes us to mis-perceive what reality is actually like.  Reality - that world that exists outside of us -  holds no opinions about us, is indifferent to what we approve or disapprove of. We are not the centre of its world.

Humanity is bound by a fixed period of life, the length of which no one knows. What existed of us before life ( if anything) and what will exist of us after life ( if anything ) are both beyond our knowing. In The Genjo Koan, by 13th Century Zen monk Dogen, he contemplates the relationship of life with death through the metaphor of 'firewood and ash'. Although there is obviously a causal link between firewood and ash, they are in very different states of existence. They are in this sense cut off from each other experientially, as are life and death.

Dogen concludes his exploration of the 'firewood and ash' metaphor with the statement:-

"Life is an instantaneous situation,

and Death is an instantaneous situation.

It is the same, for example, with Winter and Spring.

We do not think that Winter becomes Spring, 

and we do not say that Spring becomes Summer."+

We have a general sense for what the four seasons are like as experiences. Though we have our official starting dates, there isn't really a clear point where one season finishes and another begins. Even four distinct identifiable seasons has become more unpredictable with climate change. What Dogen is suggesting is that our lives and deaths are similarly inexact seasons of being.

From the experience of those that I will leave behind - one moment I am alive, and the next I am dead. All set into a landscape of sadness and grief. However, from my experience it will be different - one moment I'm alive and then I drift off into the woozy wa wa of who knows what? Will my experience post death, be a complete cessation of consciousness or something else entirely? This is beyond everyone's current experience to know or predict.

There are stages through which firewood passes before it becomes ashes. Similarly being alive passes through stages, changes in the body, mind and spirit that incrementally shift your experience over the years from youth to decrepitude. To the moment when organs falter and fail, and mental faculties falter and fail, and the body falters and fails, and then the body dies, and self consciousness  dissolves and fades away.

We know what happens to the body post its moment of demise, it decays into its constituent elements. What we do not know is what, if anything, happens to consciousness.  It is often presumed that self consciousness vanishes with the death of its bodily host. Consciousness appears not to be a personal individual possession. Buddhist doctrine implies that something survives, but it would be a mistake to believe that it's a recognisible being linked to us, surviving in the form of a distinct consciousness. And Dogen suggests as much in the ' firewood and ash' metaphor:-

"The firewood, after becoming ash, 

does not again become firewood. 

Similarly, human beings,

after death, do not live again. 

At the same time, 

it is an established custom (within Buddhism) 

not to say that life turns into death."+

In other words Life and Death as a misconceived duality, causes us to end up perceiving our existential situation solely in linear causal terms, that one thing will lead into another. Buddhism uses the term rebirth (as opposed to reincarnation) in order to counter this, to double underline that though something is reborn, this is in no way to be seen as continuation of a previous existence.  The past has its influence upon the future, but the future cannot return to being what has past. Ashes cannot become firewood again.

Consciousness is the experience of one 'instantaneous situation' as Dogen names it. Because we are self conscious, we compile these instances into a series that form a distinct life story, our personal history. But in reality we continue to have just one singular experience of one instance. A whole stream of these conscious moments is what we decide to call a life.

 

Because we live and then die, we interpret reality as things coming into creation and then being destroyed. If we take on the idea that there are only 'instantaneous situations', then a dualism of creation and destruction no longer makes sense. Destruction is a heavy duty emotionally loaded word, and represents a very human centric perception of loss and willful violence.

If you remove the human desire to see a dualism, there is only ever one singular moment of creation, one following another. Each momentary flux of creation is a re-configuring of reality. Things change, adjust, transform, to each freshly arisen circumstance. Things appear and things disappear, they arrive and they leave. It is all a flux of creation. To be alive is to be part of the flux of creation. To be dead is likewise.

Circumstances create this creation, and these are in a state of perpetual evolution. There is a person that experiences being alive and then is dead, and whatever persists after that death is not different to or separated from this perpetual state of creation. Human kind's urge and need to create is a reflection of this too. It is all a constantly changing, and you could say evolving state, that Zen Buddhism calls - Thusness.

Now you might want to call that constant state of creation God if you wish. However we chose to imagine it, there appears to be an imperative spiritually to surrender the self to it. Taoists surrender to an enigmatic state that cannot be intellectually grasped called The Way. In Buddhism, it is referred to by a number of phrases, Buddha Nature being but one. The Self tends always to be perceived as an obscuration. It's the thing preventing us from aligning our being with, or some might prefer 'communing' with, the state of Enlightenment, of God, of seeing the way things really are.

+ Taken from The Shobogenzo, The Genjo Koan, 

Translated by Nishijma & Cross, Published by Windbell

ARTICLE - Water Takes The Shape That It's Given

Inspector Montalbano is investigating the death of a prominent politician, whose body was found in a car left in a place known for prostitution. Witnesses say they saw a man having sex with a woman in that car the night before. The post mortem confirms he died of a heart attack, Montalbano, however, is suspicious about the scene of the crime, there are just one too many anomalies. He visits the deceased's widow who believes the death of her husband was politically motivated. Neither of them has any proof. 

'What can I do' bemoans Montalbano.
'Well, you could just accept the shape they gave to the water'
'what do you mean' he asks.
She recounts a childhood encounter with a young country boy .He'd put on the edge of a well a bowl, a cup and a square tin all full of water, and he was just staring at them
she asks him
'What are you doing?
he replied with a question.
'What is the shape of water?'
laughing she says
'Water doesn't have a shape, it takes the shape that its given'

I watch a lot of crime procedurals, not usually with the expectation of being left reflecting on a phrase. But 'water takes the shape that its given' stayed with me. There is something about it that made me want to dig a little deeper into the what and why of it.

I was viewing this particular episode of Montalbano the morning after five days on retreat at home had concluded. My retreat reading had been Dogen's - Sansuikyo - The Mountains & Waters Sutra, and a commentary on it by Shohaku Okumura. Other watery spiritual metaphors had seeped in from other reading directions; from Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild and Sheng Yen's commentary on Seng Ts'an's Faith In Mind. The natural symbolism of water appeared to be falling out of thin air and into my lap. Then, once the retreat was over, I was merely relaxing watching TV, and was presented with yet another.

'That -- water takes the shape that its given'

Our bodies are largely made of water, too little and we die of thirst, too much and we drown, it scalds, it freezes, it falls, it pools, it moistens, it floods, it flows, it steams, it snows. Water adapts itself to whatever circumstances it finds itself in. Water is a shape shifting element. 

'Water reaches into flames, it reaches into the mind and its images, into wit, and into discrimination, and it reaches into realisation of the Buddha-nature'     Dogen

Waters capacity to flow as a spiritual metaphor is irresistible. To be able to mimic waters ability to go with the flow of whatever it encounters, to get through, in, over, around or under it. If only our experience of life could be more like that. Moving smoothly from one thing to the next, nothing ruffling us as we ride those tigers and paddle through those doldrums. Water brings insights into a better way of relating to reality. 

That our original shape was quite like water 

Water has more than ease of flow to recommend it.  Unlike humanity water never gets stuck for long in one particular form or way of being. If water has any sense of itself as water, it is not one that is stifled or inhibited by its own self consciousness. Water doesn't have a fixed permanent sense of who it is. A quality of water is that it has no will, no desire for control over its destiny. Water is compelled to fully embrace its innate willingness to adapt and be transformed by external circumstance.  It doesn't have to be protective of, or define, who, what or how it is. Water is content within its wateriness.

'Water embraces whatever shape it currently is, however brief.'

Dogen extols the virtues of water. Though he asks us not to allow our perceptions of them to be limited only to human centred viewpoints.  Do not assume perceptions are the same for all sentient life. How, for instance, does a fish view water, what form does water take through a fish's eyesight, how would that perception feed into its imagination and way of living?  Can we conceive of what fish-water, duck-water, or Buddha-water might look like?  Lets not assume all sentient life defaults to the human way of seeing things - for why should it?

Perceptions of water take the shape that we give them.

Humanity tends to find different perspectives, different ways of doing things challenging. It prefers consistency, routine and certainty over their opposites. Our use of the internet appears to be making intolerance of other cultures and opinions more intense. History shows that people have often tried to force people to believe or see things in one way, the way that they do. If they refuse to conform, then we imprison or kill them. Yet our opinions, like our sense of our self, evolve, they are not the fixed things we think they are. Actually we all possess a more water like sense of self, even if we carry it around in a bottle.

Like water our sense of our self can become frozen

We protect self identity, reinforce its shape through how we interpret our perceptions, the stories we weave around them about who we are, why we are the way we are, what we are or are not capable of. Then apply the same criteria to other people, why they are who they are and what they are. We force ourselves and others into predefined shapes. Seeing them only as what we've made them into, the particular box that we've constructed then put them in.

'In general, ways of seeing mountains and water differ according to the type of being that sees them. There are beings which see what we call water as a string of pearls, but that does not mean that they see a string of pearls as water. They probably see as their water a form that we see as something else. We see their string of pearls as water.'    Dogen

Can we imagine ourselves being more like water? Adopting the shape of other peoples opinions and ways of being, To understand anyone requires imagination, empathy and being able to listen, often without comment, as we soften our world view in order to accommodate someone else's. To see the world as if through another persons eyes, broadens who we are or can be. Someone being different to us doesn't make them unknowable. We can befriend people entirely unlike us, it can be quite invigorating. 

We already do this in a smaller way with friends, partners and family, all the time. Unconsciously adapting our shape and way of being in order to sit easier with another person's shape and way of being. We find ourselves behaving differently with friends from schooldays than we do with those from our work or the buddhist centre. People from these different contexts don't necessarily get on, even though they all have you in common. They appreciate a different side of you. There are people you clash with all the time, something about their shape you cannot adapt to or accommodate. It's worth investigating why.

Different people's shape allow you to be a different shape too. 

There is a traditional Buddhist story of the five blindfolded people each describes what an elephant is like for them. One knows an elephant only by its trunk, another by its ears, another by its legs, another by its tail, another by its belly. Each is correct according to the experience it has of it, but incorrect in describing the whole animal.  The same goes for us and our family, partners and friends, each has their own partial view. No one can fully describe the shape of you, not even you.

' Now let us be wary of this. Is it that there are various ways of seeing one object? Or is it that we have mistakenly assumed the various images to be one object? ....If the above is so, then practice-and-experience and pursuit of the truth also may not be only of one kind or two kinds; and the ultimate state also may be of thousands of kinds and myriad varieties.'    Dogen

Lets integrate the diversity and inconsistencies that we hold within ourselves, be with them, rather than fighting against them. Resist making ourselves conform to a consistent shape, particularly if that shape is not of our choosing. The shape of ourselves can be far more flexible and fluid than we allow it to be. The same is true of other people, of our way of seeing the world, of our conception of how reality is. There maybe an infinite number of tracks up to the top of a mountain, numerous routes to cross an ocean by, many a circuitous, winding path toward Buddha Nature.  

Reality functions like water, it has no permanent shape.,

Reality shape shifts

We are shape shifting sentient beings, that do not yet realise it..

FEATURE - Three Dogen Mountain Poems

These three short poems are each written by Dogen, they arose from his reflections on the Lotus Sutra. They capture something of what he was trying to convey through his own Mountains and Waters Sutra; that an intimate connection with reality in its true state is right in front of our eyes.

In the valley, vibrating sounds
On the peak, monkeys' intermittent chattering,
I hear them as they are exquisitely expounding this sutra.

Grasping the heart of this sutra
even the voices of selling and buying
in the world are expounding the Dharma.

Colours of the mountain peak and echoes of the valley stream
all of them as they are, are nothing other
than my Shakyamuni's voice and appearance.

Eihei Dogen

EVERYDAY LIFE - Why is living in the present moment so important anyway?

We all tend to view time as something external to us that flies or passes us by, that there is either too much or not enough of. It divides up our life experience and memories into what is past, present or for the future. We tend to conceive of time as proceeding in this sequential way as our clock dials go from 1 to 24, so our day to day experiences fall like dominoes from dawn to dusk, A to B, life to death.

Time re-frames our life story, turning individual experiences and events into a self propelled narrative along a path that we visualise ourselves as having directed.  Even spiritual practice can be turned into another form of this self-improving journey, except this one ends up with the state of Enlightenment. Most of the time this causes no problems. There are, after all, countless Buddhist lists that appear to encourage us to present the purpose of Buddhist practice to be a bit like climbing a ladder or a spiral staircase. 

This implies that Enlightenment is not attainable in this present moment, but is at a point far away that we are nowhere near reaching right now. But when that point is reached, when realisation does occur, the place where that will happen will be there, right then, in that future present moment.  The sequential stages of progress may help prepare us but only so far. Whether our view is sequential or immediate, the way we conceive of and use the present moment is extremely important, if we are ever to 'see things as they really are.'

It is an overused cliche to talk of living in the present moment. We rarely ask what and where that present moment is in our experience?  Though we are aware that the present moment exists, it does so consciously only in retrospect, we analyse and comment on what has happened there, after it has happened. We say to ourselves 'Oh that was interesting' as our self-awareness kicks in subsequent to the event. When the present moment is actually happening it is just being lived, not cross-examined and probed for significance or meaning.

We cannot self-consciously make ourselves 'present' within the present moment. It's not a place where self analysis can exist alongside it, because we are so deeply embroiled as an integral part of the moment that has arisen. According to Dogen in his Shobogenzo essay Uji, our sense of being and our sense of time are one indivisible dynamic event occurring in each presenting moment. Being-Time is not a duality, it is 'not two', its like a coin without two sides, no heads, no tails, but valuable.

If only the present moment of 'being time' can be experienced then each moment contains within it everything that has ever happened, not just to ourselves but to everyone and everything that ever existed. In every singular moment we experience the impermanent nature of the phenomena happening immediately in our present life, whilst also being involved in the endless, ever shifting network of interconnected phenomena that encompasses us on a world or cosmic level, this is where 'each moment is the entire universe', as Dahnin Katagiri puts it. 'Being-time'  though experienced as particular to us, is simultaneously intimate with and inclusive of everything in every time frame.

This idea of being-time is linked philosophically with 'buddha nature' though the latter as a concept is a contentious one. That we can already be something, but not be aware of it, is inherently problematic. Dogen was not the first Buddhist to point out that this appeared to undermine the necessity for spiritual practice altogether. In the Shobogenzo chapter on Uji*** he proposes his own resolution to heal the apparent disjuncture between practice and realisation that the concept of 'buddha nature' opens up. Practice-realisation, like being-time, does not run along some imagined parallel linear trajectories, but are one singular simultaneous activity in the presenting moment. All these terms become intertwined in where they take place - the present moment.

If you hold too literally to the view that spiritual progress happens sequentially in an elevating hierarchy of states, then the concept of practice-realisation will be difficult to see the sense of. Even if one puts trust in the idea of 'buddha nature', realisation will often be impeded by subtle sub-conscious views of realisation that are sequential or self-focused in nature. Practice-realisation is not like bringing hot water, green tea leaves and a teapot together in order to make a truly fabulous cup of tea. 

Without taking it too literally, it could be said that - realisation prompts practice and practice prompts realisation. Relatively speaking, we experience practice as either 'touching' or 'not touching' full realisation, but if we were to speak from a more absolute position, practice is never in nor out of touch with realisation. At some point our words, images, concepts are always in danger of failing or implying a duality that will obscure fuller comprehension, but we have to keep trying.  Practice, because its not separate from it, is not the means to achieve realisation, but resembles a constant emanation like the beams cast from a lighthouse, sometimes intermittent, sometimes steady.

Realisation doesn't exist without practice and practice doesn't exist without realisation. After all the Buddha continued practicing meditation regularly even after his own 'awakening', if 'awakening' had been the breakthrough conclusion that would not have been necessary. Realisation is always there in the moment of practice, even though most of the time we are blind to it.

Zazen meditation practice is unique in having no purpose, no technique, no formal structure to master, nothing to be done or nothing to be gained. This is a practice that encourages no desire to 'touch' or 'not touch' full realisation, and cannot be forced to go anywhere without that willfulness becoming self-sabotaging. You sit present to whatever is there, letting go of any mental entanglement that arises and returning to the presenting moment. Zazen practice places you in a space where you rehearse how to 'just be a being' . At some point this 'practice - leads to - an experience of being-time in the present moment' and ' an experience of being-time in the present moment - leads to realisation' in one dynamic synchronous event.

That's why learning how to be in the present moment, whether on or off the cushion, in everyday life, at work or play, is considered so important.

*** My recent background reading of Uji has informed most of this article. This is reviewed in a post that will follow this article.

PS 
Within the limitations and predispositions of my own intellect, writing ability and comprehension, I've attempted to present the basic thrust of Dogen's ideas concerning the present moment in simple, clear language. Subtle nuances and fine details have inevitability been left out. All our conceptions when we are on the wrong side of Awakening will  be likewise wrong. Even the Buddha was initially unsure he could communicate his Enlightenment experience effectively. All teachings are the proverbial fingers pointing at the moon, they are only indicate the general direction we should travel in, they are not the Moon.
Insight and understanding are, as ever, a work in progress.