The Whole Picture

I’ve been thinking about the dynamics of disclosure and concealment, a concept elaborated in Huayan Buddhism and expressed in Zen as, “When one side is illuminated, the other side is dark.”

That is to say, I’ve been feeling like I consistently miss the point.  I miss the point with every point I make.  And I just missed it again.

Here is the Huayan scholar-monk Chengguan:

One the eighth date of a [lunar] month, half of the moon is bright and the other half dark; the very appearance of the bright part [the disclosed] affirms but does not negate the existence of the hidden part.  Likewise, the manifestation of something always implies the existence of the unmanifested or concealed part of the same thing.  At the moment when the bright part of the moon is disclosed, the dark part also “secretly” establishes itself.  This is the reason for the so-called simultaneous establishment of concealment and disclosure in secrecy… [trans., Garma C. C. Chang]

It’s not exactly that I miss the point, then, but that as soon as I see a point or make a point, its other side is established in the dark, secretly.  Revealing one side hides the other.

I’d like to think that “I” or “one” could have a totalistic vision – a “round view” that sees and includes all sides simultaneously.  But it seems that’s a vision reserved for Buddhas (the omniscient kind, not the deluded kind).  I think of Dogen Zenji’s point in genjokoan that we see only what our eye of practice can reach, that from the midst of the ocean we can ever only see a circle of water, though the features of coastline are infinite and various, and even though that unperceived infinity can be at some level known or appreciated.

The Platform Sutra tries to get at or around this principle of disclosure and concealment by recommending that when one makes a statement, one should also bring up the opposite.  I’ve long loved this point – I went so far as to give a Sunday talk on it once (opening to our actual life, 8/28/09), but it missed the point, of course, because it didn’t, and couldn’t, include its opposite.

This principle of simultaneous disclosure and concealment – that something is darkened the moment there is light – is constantly at work, but I notice it most when I tiptoe out onto the limb of saying something about Buddhism.  Whenever I speak about the Dharma, which has seemed like a lot lately, as loudly as my own words I hear their opposite, their insufficiency, the genuine truth that they conceal.  And even when I don’t hear it, others do.  As soon as a talk opens for questions, I know it’s coming:  the opposite.  Whatever was held up, however dimly illuminated, the light was enough to darken the other side.

“But what about…?!”

Maybe I was able to flip the coin once or twice like the Platform Sutra says.  Or maybe, like Dogen, I was even able to flip it multiple times, each time bringing light to a concealed truth.  As soon as there is the new light, though, the last truth goes dark – the previous point is “established in secrecy,” becomes the concealed.

So in a talk when I raise “this,” I obscure “that.”  And it can be frustrating.  I can oscillate, making “that” into “this” for a moment, but then the last “this” becomes “that” – oscillation is not totality.  Or I can try – as the Zen tradition has long practiced – to express in a mode that is in-between or beyond, that doesn’t land on a “this” and thus avoids making “thats”.  But then what’s said?  If nothing was concealed, I’m afraid it was because nothing was revealed.

Why not just commit, knowing it’s partial?  That seems like the only real option.

So I commit, knowing excruciatingly how partial it is, and I say something.  Maybe somehow by some grace I could at the same time say two sides of a thing, but even so there would still be infinite sides left unsaid.  More reliable is just to notice, to know, and to deeply feel that this expression is just my “eye of practice” right now, is just the Dharma that’s revealed right now, and that the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite, and that the concealed truths are completely intertwined with the disclosed ones, that the spoken and the unspoken are completely co-dependent, are all completely in the room.

When I say something – anything – I want to know and embody the fact that it’s only half of the story, at most.  Or, as Dogen might have it, it’s not that it’s half a complete truth, but it’s a complete half-truth.  Confidently, crazily, completely spewing half-truths, completely embodying my momentary, dim eye of practice as just that.  As wholly just part.

Buddha Nature Class Begins…

As many of you know from recent posts, I’ve been gearing up to teach a six-week class at Green Gulch Farm on “The Practice and Problem of Buddha Nature”.  Some of you have expressed an interest in following along with the course, and I wanted you to know that I’m uploading materials to www.shoresofzen.com as we go.

The first class was last night, and an audio recording has been uploaded to www.shoresofzen.com/buddhanature.  Text materials for the class – including a reading list, Suzuki Roshi on Buddha Nature, some Buddha Nature koans, and some short scholarly summaries of the subject – are also up on the same page.

May all beings know their basic nature!

The practice I want and the practice I have

Some amazing changes have taken place in my life in these last few months, which has meant little or no time to think about writing anything up for this blog.  I’m grateful to Jiryu for the steady stream of pieces he’s been posting while I’ve been more or less incommunicado, and wanted to at least share a bit of an update.

First, on December 7, my wife Devon gave birth to our son Gabriel James Rutschman Miller.  I’m not sure what to say about the birth.  There was something shamanic about it, those long hours of fear and pain and blood.  The staff at the birthing center let us keep the lights off in the room, and in the darkness it felt like we were in a cave, like we had been transported to some ancient and vivid realm.  The nurses came in and out of the room carrying flashlights, these little hand-held streams of light bobbing up and down.  Gabriel was born in the very early morning, and screamed his head off and flung his arms around and climbed up Devon’s chest to snuggle in.  He has a ton of dark hair, bright eyes.  My heart is blown wide open.

And then, about six weeks into the glorious, terrifying, exhausting, gorgeous upheaval of this new life with the baby, another piece of news—my mother-in-law Rebeccah, with whom we’ve lived since we returned to California last June, has discovered cancer in her bones.  Tests and procedures—a surgical biopsy, blood tests, a bone scan.  A few nights in the hospital last week.  We are still waiting to hear the exact diagnosis, and the treatment options, but in the meantime we’ve rearranged the entire house—moved her things downstairs into our room, and moved all of ours up into hers—to try to adapt to her new limited mobility.

My practice these days has a different shape than it has at other times in my life, and a different shape than the practice I imagine when I close my eyes and see what comes to mind when I say the word “practice.”  Not much zazen;  not many ceremonies;  not much Dharma study.  I’ve gone over a month without an occasion to put on the okesa.  Instead, I get up early and commute a long ways to work—I’m a grief counselor in hospice—and come back home to my scared and brave household try to figure out how to be a husband and a father and a son-in-law in this particular situation.  Generous friends come by with food.  We are all very tired.

Not necessarily the practice I want, the one I would have chosen—but the practice I have.

“What is Buddha?” Hui Ch’ao asks in Case 7 of the Blue Cliff Record.

“You are Hui Ch’ao,” Fa-yen says.

Not the practice I want, but the practice I have.  Not the life I might want, but the life that arises.  Not the world that’s the most convenient for us, for any of us, but the world that is.

Now my son is having belly trouble—his stomach cramps up from time to time and he shrieks and thrashes and his little face turns red.  Devon’s adjusted her diet considerably, but so far it hasn’t seemed to make a huge difference.  A lot of the time he’s doing great, cooing and smiling, but late at night his stomach can start to bother him.  When that happens I sometimes put him in a baby carrier against my chest and go for a walk up and down the block.  The cool night air seems to soothe him—I zip my sweatshirt up around his legs.  Once he’s asleep, I recite sutras as I walk, or say the refuges over and over again, or just let my mind drift from concern to concern—work, money, Rebeccah, Gabriel.  I feel my feet on the sidewalk through my thin slippers, the baby breathing against me.  It’s our kinhin.

Is the World Real?

Thinking about Buddha Nature lately, as I mentioned in my last post, I’ve come around to the question of whether the world is “real”. Or the question, at least, of whether the Buddhadharma – with it’s tropes of “illusion,” “bubble,” “dream” – is actually about the unreality of the world.

It can really sound like it; isn’t the ultimate understanding something like, “no eyes, no ears, no nose…”? Buddhism does teach that there are no substantial person-selves (Pali teachings), and that indeed nothing at all exists of itself (Mahayana). Buddhism also teaches that nothing can really be said about “reality” (Madhyamaka), and that what we see as the external world is completely informed by our own mind – projected from it, dependent on it – and lacks substance in that way as well (Yogacara).

All of these teachings can sound like “this isn’t real,” but it seems to me that that isn’t really the point. The teachings are that nothing can be grasped, that nothing persists over time, and that nothing is independent. That nothing can be ultimately said or posited about reality.

The teachings don’t seem to me, though, to deny that something is happening. Actually something really cool is happening. Something inconceivably amazing.

But what is that? And how do we talk about it?

Radical negation is one approach – “This thing that’s happening is not what we think it is!”

Mind-only is another approach – “This thing that’s happening is only what we think it is!”

But these are principally negative approaches, they are apophatic. And in that, they can be easily misconstrued as pointing away from the world, pointing away from this delusive, perceived reality. “Oh, this world – it’s not real.”

Buddha Nature teaching, on the other hand, is willing – like the bodhisattva – to wholeheartedly enter the muddy world of perceived reality, and to not just dismiss it but to say something positive about it. To say something like: “What this reality is, is awakened nature, is the process of awakening, is awakened mind.”

This is to describe reality in a cataphatic way, one that invites us more brightly to open to the fullness of our world, our perceived, and however deluded, experience of it.

This positive approach doesn’t overturn any of the other teachings, but it adds to them. It even carries them, because in a way they are what this wonderful nature refers to. Their truth is itself what is meant by the unborn and undying Buddha nature.

Buddhism does seem to say that generally speaking we don’t really get what’s going on here, but it also says that what’s going on here is unspeakable beautiful, unspeakably perfect, unspeakably, vibrantly, awake to its own truth.

Since I have to think of “reality” in some way, why not take a view that’s that friendly?

It might help me relax, and actually arrive here.

Objectifying the Dharma

In my last post I brought up the idea that my failure to “grasp” or “have” some place, person, thing – or even my life itself – isn’t due to the inadequacy of my practice of presence or attention (although my practice is certainly inadequate!) but has more to do with the fact that phenomena are by their nature ungraspable. Impermanence isn’t something I’m doing wrong.

This point is on my mind again as I prepare for my upcoming class series at Green Gulch, The Practice and Problem of Buddha Nature.

It’s on my mind because as I enter into my study of this sticky and wonderful Dharma, I’m noticing that in the same way I can’t grasp Tassajara or Green Gulch or my family, I can’t grasp the Dharma either. Not because I’m not studying hard enough (although that, too, is certainly the case), but because the Dharma isn’t a fixed object – it’s not really an object at all.

When I* study the Dharma (*thanks, Jacqueline, for pointing out in a recent comment the priestly arrogance of the word “we” – the temptation lingers, but I am working against the stream…) – when I study or even just bring “Dharma” to mind, I notice that right away I’ve objectified it. Before I’ve even opened the book, I’ve assumed that there is some object the book refers to, some fixed referent. Without so much noticing, I imagine that there is a “Dharma treasure” out there that is fixed and permanent and graspable. Whether it’s the Buddhist teachings themselves that are that object I want to “really get a handle on,” or whether I imagine the teachings as a map to some real destination beyond them that I’ll capture, in either case the frame is wrong. Maybe a wrong frame is useful sometimes, but basically it’s misleading.

It’s misleading because it’s a lot more slippery than that. When Dharma at least begins to “fill my body and mind,” I can see that there really is “something missing.”

For one, Buddhism the tradition is nothing like a coherent whole. Not only are there sects and schools and lineages each with their radically different approaches, but even within a lineage, or in the words of one teacher (think Dogen Zenji, Suzuki Roshi), there are whole worlds of nuance and possibility and flexibility.

It takes a nineteenth-century style mystical contortion to hold all of these teachings to refer to one single stable object, and it’s a contortion that ends up not giving life to the traditions but stripping life from them (all texture and color subsumed, washed out, in the One, unrefracted White Light).

A tension-solving contortion isn’t the way I want to study. The way I want to study the Dharma isn’t to capture a fixed object – and anyway as a Buddhist in the postmodern era that dream is twice dashed – but to enter into this flow of possibility, this flow of inquiry.

More basically than the doctrinal or historical study of the Buddhist religion, the “True Dharma” itself – if it’s a true Dharma in any real, pervasive way – can’t really be an object. It can’t really be enshrined on a fixed and permanent throne somewhere distant, waiting for me find it. If it’s a true Dharma, it can’t be the kind of object that a subject like me would make. If it’s really the Way of things, then I can’t point to it somewhere, I can’t approach it as just another one of those things. So maybe I’d call it a “non-thing” – as negation-loving Zen-types so often do – but that’s just to make it into a new kind of object, long understood to be an even more pernicious one.

If I can enter the study without making the teachings be about some thing, then I can appreciate that the ten thousand doctrinal and practice tensions are not just a complicated but resolvable math problem. (With all due respect to math – I’m sure mathematicians know better than anyone that even the resolved problems aren’t really resolved, but still pulse with mystery….) It’s not a done deal, but an evolving, involving conversation. The Dharma is and has been simply a gathering place for people reflecting on the impossibly strange fact of life. It’s a café or a rave or, God forbid, a blog comment feed.

It’s not an object.

It’s dynamic.

It’s alive.

It’s a life.

Pounding the roofs of Green Gulch, a hard and overdue rain.

Failing to Grasp

pictures from Frank’s Blog 

Last summer I spent a couple of days at Tassajara – the wide sky, the endless mountains. The temple bell, the main gate, the fan that turns slowly on the kitchen roof. I climbed a little ways up the slope above the hill cabins, felt the hot sun on my skin, and thought, I’d like to really be here again sometime. I’d like to have this again.

I had a plan to spend the three-month fall practice period there, and that comforted me, as I sat on the hot hill, hearing the rush of the creek and the shuffling of squirrels. Oh, good. I will get to have this again. I’d lived at Tassajara for about five years, but already it felt like a long time ago.

Now that three-month practice period has come and gone, and I confess that before, during, and after have been marked by much the same feeling I had on the hillside. I’d sure like to really be here sometime.

A couple of old sayings come to mind. Basho, and Dogen:

Even in Kyoto / Hearing the cuckoo’s cry / I long for Kyoto

When Dharma fills your body and mind, you understand that something is missing.

The truth seems to be that Tassajara, like Green Gulch, like Kyoto, like Albuquerque, isn’t actually graspable. We can never really arrive, because the world and things aren’t really like that.

We can never really get a hold of anything, not because we “aren’t present enough” or are “too distracted” or “not there long enough,” but because what we think of as objects aren’t actually objects, and what we think is this subject isn’t really a subject like that. What we think is of the nature to be held is in actuality completely unholdable.

Frequently people come by Green Gulch, where I’m living now – a different deep beauty I am now failing to grasp - and they tell me how lucky I am to live here. They are right – I can’t account for the rare fortune of this life.

But behind that kind of talk I also hear the same glimmer I felt on the Tassajara hillside: “You must be able to grasp this place, since you live here. You must have it.”

But of course I don’t. I don’t have Green Gulch, and can’t hold it for even a second. I don’t have a family – a beautiful, wise wife or an adorable, brilliant child – because I can’t keep them either. Not in the long haul and not even right now, right in this flash of beauty.

I can appreciate. And I strive to appreciate. And moment by moment that appreciation can be renewed. But that doesn’t mean I get it. It doesn’t mean I’ve exhausted it, or own it, or can get my fingers or mind around it at all in the slightest.

A sense of loss, perhaps, but a sense of relief, too. A sharpening of this unkeepable, fierce beauty.

(A note to our email subscribers:  sorry about a couple of recent notifications for drafts of posts.  A keystroke error I seem to be making consistently is publishing posts prematurely, sending you all an incomplete post with a broken link.  I hope it doesn’t happen again!  Thanks.)

Two Years of No Zen!

Happy Birthday No Zen!

I wanted to share my joy with you all at the two-year anniversary of No Zen in the West and to thank you for coming along.

In the spirit of celebration, I can’t resist a little retrospective, some reflection on what No Zen has been and will I hope continue to be. In these two years the blog has far surpassed my expectations — we’ve published 45 posts, and in 2011 we’ve had 3,500 unique visitors! (I don’t know how many of them were robots, but at least a few of you are most likely actual people!)

When No Zen in the West first kicked off, even before the pixels had dried on the first post (now a dedicated page introducing the project) I was already hearing about people pissed off by it. Success!

Oh yeah, that guy Jiryu — he’s one of those assholes who say there’s no Zen in the West…

The truth is, of course, that though I have long flirted with being just such an asshole, that has never been the point for me personally or for this blog. As I said in that first post, it’s just that I think these irritants — these obnoxious bugs who won’t let us rest in our confidence in our Zen — are super-worthwhile. The “No Zen in the West” bugs aren’t the only ones I value — I also appreciate the “no one cares about Zen” bug, the “Zen is for old people” bug, and really any other bugs I can find that will buzz us out of whatever satisfied complacency we may harbor about the excellence of our Way.

I don’t raise the challenges so that we abandon something vital and deep — I don’t think bugs can make us do that. Their buzzing around – like they do in monks’ ears and eyes at Tassajara during the five hot days of September Tangaryo — just drives us deeper. It doesn’t drive us away from our faith but into our deeper faith. That deeper faith can’t be about the institution or the ancestral tradition or the relevance for our time or any of that — it’s just a deep faith that this is how we must live, how our hearts long to live.

You may not believe me, but whatever bugs we summon here are to encourage us to go deeper than the bugs. What refuge can we find when the refuge we’ve settled for turns out to be termite-infested? We have to go deeper. And then deeper again…

At the start of this second year of No Zen, I was joined by my blood-and-Dharma brother Hondo Dave.  A fellow bug-catcher, bug-tamer, bug-bringer, it’s been a real joy to collaborate with him on this forum.

On top of a passion for bug-parading, Hondo and I share a commitment to and curiosity about the ways that what we think of as “practice” can be made real in the lives that we have, in this culture we have, in the midst of the values and responsibilities we have.  Along with that inquiry, that insistence that practice stay “real,” we’re also both drawn to Dharma study – in its devotional and academic flavors alike — and push to explore whether and how that study, too, has relevance for our lives of practice.

It may turn some people off when Hondo and I use this blog to reflect on and process our intellectual study, citing obscure ancestors and sketchy ancient schools to fill out our understanding of Buddhism and Zen, or drawing on the work of Western intellectuals to sort out what this “West” is that the teachings are adapting to, and the resources it too brings to the table. But we go into these more abstracted realms because both of us are clear that these are all gates, are all openings into the lived Dharma.

Also, we think it’s fun. (It turns out Dharma gates are everywhere — so why not play in the ones we find fun?)

We rely on you all, though, to help us to keep it “real,” to hold us to our task of translating our musings into a whole life of Dharma practice.

In fact we rely on you for more than that – we rely on you for it all, for giving us this platform and for joining us here to keep it rich and full. Thank you all for thinking and wondering and sitting with us in this midst of this Zen and this West and this No Zen and this East and this tangle that’s exactly our life.