A non-Buddhist translator comments on Zen Master Dogen's "Rules of Sitting-Zen for All"... and thus gropes ineffectually towards non-preaching of the backward step of turning light and shining.
posted by Mike Cross at 11:18 AM
From 1982 to 1997 I worked on the translation of Master Dogen's Shobogenzo, and understood the primary importance in the Buddha's teaching of full lotus sitting. Until 1994 my attitude to this sitting practice could be summed up in the words: "Don't think. Just do it!" Then in 1994 I returned from Japan to England to train to be a teacher of the FM Alexander Technique, and experiences with Alexander work woke me up to the opposite standpoint of "Don't just do. Think it!" Far from smoothing my path, however, Alexander insights (or reactions to them) caused a lot of trouble between me and my aging teacher in Japan. Then in 2008, seeking clearer water further upstream, I found a new lease of life in the extant Sanskrit works of the 12th ancestor in Dogen's lineage -- the great Indian teacher Ashvaghosha.
4 Comments:
Sometimes I feel a strong pull away from books and blogs, away from my work which is very intellectual. The pull is maybe like that which keeps you going and takes you off to France and sees me dragging myself out of bed before the kids for zazen or holed-up at retreats in the bliss of the last zazen of the night or the first of the morning.
Master Dogen writes:
'Revere a person who is beyond study and spontaneous.'
I wish to become a person who is beyond study and spontaneous, I wish it with my sitting and I like the idea too. But, as an idea, it doesn't seem to be something I can really do except in the moment of my sitting. This question is much like Ordinary Pete's about 'becoming ineffable...'
What is Master Dogen talking about? What does it mean to be beyond study? The confidence you are manifesting now may be it but that is at odds with Marjory Barlow's assertion that 'being wrong is the best friend we've got.' Dogen is not equating 'beyond study' with 'being right' but what then?
The pull away is tainted with my fear of abdicating the responsibilities of my life, to family and colleagues, to my work.
But can I make that leap into zazen...can I? What does it mean in this context to leave family life?
Fully making that leap is a little like a suicide, it seems that impossible to me.
“it doesn't seem to be something I can really do except in the moment of my sitting.”
Being spontaneous is not something any of us can do, including in the moment of our sitting.
We cannot do it, but by deciding NOT TO DO, we can create a space in which it can happen. It is this decision NOT TO DO that Alexander called the most mental thing there is. This decision NOT TO DO, “inhibition” in Alexander jargon, is the basis of Alexander’s conscious means-whereby, which is opposed to unconscious end-gaining.
I know this, and I am able to say it to you with confidence, MT, purely because of the input I have had from excellent Alexander teachers -- Ray Evans, Ron Colyer, Nelly Ben-Or, and Marjory Barlow, to name the main ones.
I didn’t learn this from Gudo. The way Gudo taught me to sit was pure unconscious doing. I didn’t learn this from Shobogenzo. Although I am convinced that non-doing is just what Master Dogen was writing about, I couldn’t understand it only from his written words. I learnt the principle of non-doing, and experienced the benefit of non-doing, under the compassionate hands and eyes of living teachers -- Alexander teachers.
The confidence I am manifesting now is only that, by doing, I went wrong -- I followed a wrong track. In my effort to lengthen, I narrowed.
Why do I use the past tense? When I think of lengthening, I tend to narrow. The difference between then and now is that now I am at least partially aware, at least some of the time, of narrowing as a wrong tendency. This is not at odds with Marjory’s teaching. I am not confident that I dropped off the wrong tendency. Rather, I am confident that I haven’t. My great certainty is that I went wrong and am wrong... ZEHI KANSURU KOTO NAKARE; Don’t care about right and wrong!
ZETSUGAKU MU-I NO HITO, a person who is beyond study and spontaneous, is a person who is free of end-gaining, who has no interest in being right, and is therefore at ease in his own skin. For me, for example, the Alexander teacher Ron Colyer, who I see most Fridays, is a person very much like that.
Master Dogen’s teaching in Fukan-zazengi, as I shall endeavor to elucidate more clearly for you in a forthcoming post (KYU-KYU BO EN; forgetting involvments for ever), is just to abdicate all the responsibilities of your life. That is part of learning the backward step of turning light around.
But our life, even a life devoted to sitting-zen, cannot be only one big backward step. It is also forward steps. Hence MOSHI ZA YORI TATABA; if you rise from sitting..... Hence SHUKO SARA NI KORE BYOJO MONO NARI; the direction of effort becomes more balanced and constant. Hence JUYO NYO-I NARAN; you will be able to accept and use [from the jewel-treasury] as you please.
If, having devoted yourself to your evening sitting, it pleases you to utilize your family jewels, and your partner to receive them, Master Dogen’s teaching, even in Fukan-zazengi, is that you should joyfully receive and utilize your family jewels!
To give up a happy love life for the sake of trying to be right is never Master Dogen’s teaching. Trying to be celibate is just a recipe for unhappiness. This, again, I can say with certain knowledge.
In the end, it all boils down to this: Don’t end-gain for the result you wish for. Rather, endeavor to wake up to your end-gaining. Waking up to it is enough -- you needn’t do anything; just wake up to it. This is the means-whereby, the indirect means-whereby, we create a space for something to happen spontaneously.
I am writing this, you understand, primarily for myself. To spell it out for you, as clearly as I can, really helps me. I am the one who most needs to hear it.
'It is vital that the ears vis-à-vis the shoulders, and the nose vis-à-vis the navel, are caused to oppose each other.'
As what seems to me to be an essential and one of very few actual instructions for zazen, I wonder if you could clarify what Dogen means by this?
I am not free of wishing to be right, even the 'rightness' of wishing to be someone who has left end-gaining far behind. So I am not free, that much I know.
MIMI TO KATA TO TAI SHI, HANA TO HESO TO TAI SESHIMEN KOTO O YO SU.
MIMI ears
TO and [joining particle]
KATA shoulders
TO and [joining particle]
TAI SHI to oppose
HANA nose
TO and [joining particle]
HESO navel
TO and [joining particle]
TAI SESHIMEN to cause to oppose, to let oppose, to direct away from each other
KOTO fact, thing -- here used gramatically
O [object particle]
YO SU to be vital, to be pivotal
“It is vital that ears vs. shoulders, and nose vs. navel, are caused to oppose each other.”
I can’t clarify over the internet what Dogen means by this. I might be able to do a better job in the context of a one-to-one Alexander lesson. That is what the teacher’s use of his or her hands in an Alexander lesson is for -- to put meaning into those words. If you can find on the internet video footage of Alexander with his left hand on his pupil’s head and his right hand spreading across the pupil’s back, spreading out the pupil’s shoulder blades, that may give you a hint.
What I can try to clarify for you here is what Dogen DOES NOT mean by this instruction. He doesn’t mean to do something. He doesn’t mean to end-gain. He doesn’t mean to fiddle about in a piece-meal fashion, trying to adjust one’s posture symmetrically.
You say that it is an actual instruction for zazen, I suspect, because you understand it as a direct instruction to do something -- an instruction to fiddle about with your posture directly, to arrange yourself. But it is not that. It really is not that.
The key is the Chinese character indicating causation (SESHIMEN). When we investigate in detail what causes the release Master Dogen is describing, it is not a direct doing, but rather an undoing, a giving up, a dropping off.
One of Marjory Barlow’s favourite and best phrases was “You can’t do an undoing.”
You see, MT, the interpretation of Fukan-zazengi that I am writing for you here is all just too true. It is so true it amazes even me. But none of it is my own. None of it at all. It all comes from Alexander. All I have done is put 2 + 2 together, and realize that 2 + 2 does not equal 17.
MT wrote:
“I am not free of wishing to be right, even the 'rightness' of wishing to be someone who has left end-gaining far behind. So I am not free, that much I know.”
MT! Now you are talking!
Your comment reminds me of an exchange I had a few weeks ago with Elizabeth Walker, a 90+ yr-old Alexander teacher who was trained by FM Alexander himself. She was relating how, at an AT gathering in the US where she and Marjory were teaching together, they would begin every day by chalking on the blackboard in big letters: BE HAPPY TO BE WRONG! (Or words to that effect.)
Knowing how well-nigh impossible this is for me, I quipped “Or be happy trying to be right?”
Elizabeth held out her left palm, slapped it with her right palm, pointed at me and cried out with delight “That’s it!”
ZE-HI KANSURU KOTO NAKARE “Don’t care about being right or wrong.”
I am beginning to think, MT, that the blogging experiment we have been doing for nearly 2 years now, may have helped us both move on in the right direction. I think what happened to Christianity after the invention of the printing press is in the process of being repeated now for the Buddha’s teaching. And our experiment, moving with enthusiasm from failure to failure, has been part of that.
Along the way, people have advised me to stop blogging. I think that some of my responses along the way have caused Pierre Turlur, for example, and others too, to feel ashamed of me. Along the way, indeed, I have often felt ashamed of myself, and discouraged. But in the end I always figured: Fuck it! What have I got to lose?
ZE-HI KANSURU KOTO NAKARE “Don’t care about being right or wrong.”
I do care. Because I care, I end-gain. To care is to end-gain. To end-gain is to care. I do care. I do end-gain. But at least I begin to see it. And just in the seeing of it, there is liberation from it.
Post a Comment
<< Home