This is a teisho – like a cross between a Dharma Talk and guided meditation. Last week I led a sesshin, or a silent Zen retreat. Participants participated in a 24-hour schedule of zazen, chanting, silent work, formal meals, and rest. Once a day, I offered a “teisho” during zazen. “Tei” means to offer or put forth, and “sho” means to recite or proclaim. Teisho are sometimes called “encouragement talks,” and they are meant to help listeners connect with the Dharma in the spaciousness and silence of zazen. Teisho are not about explanations or the imparting of information, and they generally are not recorded. They are offered spontaneously, just for the moment, just for those listening. Although you may not be sitting zazen while you listen to this episode, I thought I would offer you a teisho as if you are.
Note! The text version of this episode is just the quotes plus some basic notes, as it is meant to be listened to!
Zen is full of exhortations to wake up! Arouse Bodhicitta, don’t just sleepwalk through life! Life as a dream – not disparaging, imperfect metaphor, but reflects reality. In a dream, exciting or disturbing, you are caught up, you believe it, are invested in it; then on waking you go “Whew, just a dream!” That is how our everyday concerns, our self-centeredness, our personal drama appears from the perspective of the absolute – “Whew, just a dream!”
Of course, it isn’t that our everyday lives aren’t important – we take the utmost care, practice the precepts – but they aren’t important the way we are convinced they are. Instead, they are a passing and fascinating phenomenon, regardless of our personality or conditions.
Wake up! Arouse bodhicitta… but how? Hongzhi:
If illumination neglects serenity then aggressiveness appears… but if serenity neglects illumination, murkiness leads to wasted Dharma.[i]
We quite rightly reject striving and struggle – you can’t transcend the self (there’s still a you). Quite right to treasure acceptance, patience, shikantaza. And yet… if you think you’re just sitting, you’re not. Dogen:
When you have still not fully realized the dharma in body-mind, you think it is sufficient. When the dharma fills body-mind, you feel some lack.[ii]
We don’t need to strive for something, but we do need to keep letting go in a radical way, never satisfied. We can be deeply at peace with ourselves and our lives while still seeking to grow, to become more familiar with reality, to act in accord with our deepest aspirations
Practicing for the sake of our own suffering, then for others, then for the sake of the Dharma… For the sake of the Dharma we work to become more and more and more… simple, open, humble. Hongzhi:
Silent and serene, forgetting words, bright clarity appears before you. When you reflect it, you become vast. Where you embody it, you are spiritually uplifted.[iii]
We may fear this is just wishful thinking, that we are unnecessarily reintroducing dissatisfaction into our lives once we’ve gotten relatively happy, but it’s not like this.
Huston Smith addresses this relationship in the following passage (from Why Religion Matters):
…the finitude of mundane existence cannot satisfy the human heart completely. Built into the human makeup is a longing for a ‘more’ that the world of everyday experience cannot requite. This outreach strongly suggests the existence of the something that life reaches for in the way that the wings of birds point to the reality of air. (Smith, Huston. Why Religion Matters: The Fate of the Human Spirit in an Age of Disbelief. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001)
There are descriptions that discourage grasping but move the heart, awaken bodhicitta. Hongzhi:
[The empty field] cannot be cultivated or proven. From the beginning it is altogether complete, undefiled and clear down to the bottom. Where everything is correct and totally sufficient, attain the pure eye that illuminates thoroughly, fulfilling liberation. Enlightenment involves enacting this; stability develops from practicing it… When you reach the truth without middle or edge, cutting off before and after, then you realize one wholeness… Clearly this affair occurs within your own house.[iv]
This is not some special state you attain in meditation or outside of it. Instead, it’s waking up to what is already true, what is already around and within you, what has been true from the beginning. Hongzhi:
Spiritually solitary and shining, inner illumination restores wonder.[v]
Think of the wonder of a child compared to the delusion of an adult who thinks they know everything, seeing only their mental map. The practice of silent illumination loosens our grip on mental map. For a moment it can fall away, or some small gap may open up in it, and you recognize that what you perceive is so much more true, so much grander than your mental map.
Bodhidharma describes some of these moments of opening:
…when you first embark on the Path, your awareness won’t be focused. You’re likely to see all sorts of strange, dreamlike scenes. But you shouldn’t doubt that all such scenes come from your own mind and nowhere else.
If, as in a dream, you see a light brighter than the sun, your remaining attachments will suddenly come to an end and the nature of reality will be revealed. Such an occurrence serves as the basis for enlightenment. But this is something only you know. You can’t explain it to others.
Or if, while you’re walking, standing, sitting, or lying in a quiet grove, you see a light, regardless of whether it’s bright or dim, don’t tell others and don’t focus on it. It’s the light of your own nature.
Or if, while you’re walking, standing, sitting, or lying in the stillness and darkness of night, everything appears as though in daylight, don’t be startled. It’s your own mind about to reveal itself.[vi]
These moments that make us dance… we can’t grasp them, but we should honor them as glimpses of reality, and practice to make ourselves more and more open, perceptive, and humble.
Buddha-Nature as one of the many descriptors of Reality, pointing toward the experience of sentient beings who are ultimately not separate from anything Huang Po:
Our original Buddha-Nature is, in highest truth, devoid of any atom of objectivity. It is void, omnipresent, silent, pure; it is glorious and mysterious peaceful joy—and that is all. Enter deeply into it by awaking to it yourself. That which is before you is it, in all its fullness, utterly complete. There is naught beside. Even if you go through all the stages of a Bodhisattva’s progress towards Buddhahood, one by one; when at last, in a single flash, you attain to full realization, you will only be realizing the Buddha-Nature which has been with you all the time; and by all the foregoing stages you will have added to it nothing at all.{15} You will come to look upon those aeons of work and achievement as no better than unreal actions performed in a dream.[vii]
Maybe you think, Oh, I’ve experienced this, I know what he’s talking about! Maybe that’s true. But are you going to be satisfied with a memory? What is your relationship to your Buddha-nature at this very moment?
Chances are you are not blissed out with “glorious and mysterious peaceful joy” at this moment. Don’t get caught up thinking about past and future, however… constant change is the nature of human experience – of everything. We will have blissful moments and awful moments. Boring moments and distracted moments. We can’t grasp the Buddha-nature or the glorious and mysterious peaceful joy.
We can remind ourselves, or inspire ourselves, with this kind of description. Let it arouse our bodhicitta… let it light a fire within, spark our determination.
Something is required of us. We can’t just intellectual accept Dharma teachings and expect to taste their liberative quality for ourselves. We can’t just adopt the mantra, “It’s all right here, there’s nothing to gain,” and expect to fulfill our heart’s deepest aspirations.
Precious Mirror Samadhi:
Move and you are trapped, miss and you fall into doubt and vacillation. Turning away and touching are both wrong, for it is like massive fire.[viii]
Taoism, part of our Chan lineage…
Tao = way, according to David Hinton, “a generative cosmological process, an ontological “pathWay” by which things come into existence, evolve through their lives, and then go out of existence, only to be transformed and reemerge in a new form.”[ix] Ch’i = life-force and matter simultaneously; dark-enigma = Tao before it is named; Absence itself acting = we-wei, absence-action.
Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching ):
Can you let your spirit embrace primal-unity without drifting away?
Can you focus ch’i into such softness you’re a newborn again?
Can you polish the dark-enigma mirror to a clarity beyond stain?
Can you make loving the people and ruling the nation Absence itself acting?
Can you be female opening and closing heaven’s gate?
Can you fathom earth’s four distances with radiant wisdom and know nothing?
Give birth and nurture.
Give birth without possessing and foster without dominating:
this is called dark-enigma Integrity.[x]
Endnotes
[i] Guidepost for Silent Illumination. Leighton, Taigen Dan (translator). Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. Boston, MA: Tuttle Publishing, 2000
[ii] Genjokoan. Eihei Dogen. https://www.sotozen.com/eng/library/key_terms/pdf/key_terms06.pdf
[iii] Guidepost for Silent Illumination. Leighton, Taigen Dan (translator). Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. Boston, MA: Tuttle Publishing, 2000
[iv] Leighton, Taigen Dan (translator). Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. Boston, MA: Tuttle Publishing, 2000
[v] Guidepost for Silent Illumination. Leighton, Taigen Dan (translator). Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of Zen Master Hongzhi. Boston, MA: Tuttle Publishing, 2000
[vi] Bodhidharma. The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma (p. 42). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.
[vii] Yun, Huang Po His. The Zen Teachings of Huang Po: On The Transmission Of Mind (p. 35). Hauraki Publishing. Kindle Edition.
[viii] Japanese Soto Shu Translation: https://www.sotozen.com/eng/, https://www.sotozen.com/eng/practice/sutra/pdf/01/06.pdf
[ix] Hinton, David. The Way of Ch’an: Essential Texts of the Original Tradition (p. 323). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
[x] Hinton, David. The Way of Ch’an: Essential Texts of the Original Tradition (p. 30). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
