http://www.wwzc.org/Jinmyo_osho/Stainless.htm
Dharma Assembly:
Stainless
Dharma Talk by
Ven. Jinmyo Renge osho
Dainen-ji, June 9th, 2007
Everything is already open. The characteristic of each moment of
experience or “dharma” is that it is annica or impermanent and
sunya or empty, transparent and open. Another way of saying this is
that everything is “stainless”.
The stainlessness of this moment is not only the fact that colours
and forms are as they are or that sensations are as they are; the
fact is that this moment cannot be grasped. There is no particular
angle that you can take upon this moment because it is too vast and
it is constantly changing. You arise within it, I arise within it,
we all arise within it. When we realize this through our practice
then we realize that we too are stainless.
Sitting in the posture of zazen, there is nothing to hold on to.
Even if you were to grab onto your zafu to try to hold it firm or
hold yourself firmly to it, there is still the zabuton underneath
it and the floor beneath that, room all around you and the air and
the light and the sounds drifting through the open windows. The
moment is stainless, unconditioned, empty of boundary and this is
where you can release whatever you are holding. There is no one who
can possibly hold, nothing to be held.
The Buddha's Teaching of
impermanence is not a feeling about things and it is not
theoretical. It is not something that happens to things, let alone
something that might or might not happen to things. It is how
things always are. Stainlessness is not a mystical shining void, a
special place, a special experience. It is what each and every
moment already is.
How the bodymind experiences experience occurs as mind-moments. How
many details are presenting themselves as you sit here facing the
wall? Your noticing of them, when you notice them, even if you are
noticing very few of them, is very, very fast. Faster than you can
think about them.
As Anzan Hoshin roshi says in the text “The Heart of This
Moment”,
In this open space, there is little for us to be
deluded about; we are not acting out our fabrications and
self-deceptions and so we can see them very clearly. Since
there is little for them to fix themselves on, they don't have much
weight and so we find that they can shift very quickly.
Seeing this shifting is an essential part of Investigation.
Seeing how attention alights upon one object, and then upon another
and another and another. Seeing how these are not one thing
and, although attention is continually being disposed through habit
and impulse toward localizing, there is also a quality of shifting
present. Despite the fact that attention is continually
pulling and pushing, there is no continuity to what is being held,
to what is being pushed. There is only this shifting, this
changing. The impermanence of dharmas displays itself
openly. In each moment of mind, in the arising of whatever
presents itself, radical impermanence is revealed.
When we are practicing we can see the movements of attention
towards habitual thoughts and feelings and when we choose to open
attention through mindfulness practice, when we align with Reality,
our actions are more and more guided by Openness itself. But when
we stop practising, the space of open experiencing becomes
cluttered with storylines and feeling tones; snippets of past
experiencing; bits and pieces of current storylines; lumps and
chunks of disjointed thoughts and feelings. Contraction leads to
further contraction. Sometimes you get angry. You feel
misunderstood. You think you know what everything is, what's
going on, what will happen. One storyline leads into another and
another. It looks like “this” and “this”. But you're not seeing anything. It
sounds like “this and “this”. But you're not hearing anything. It
feels like “this” and “this”. But you're not feeling anything.
Except the state.
Out of all of details - the infinite range of details you could be
noticing - why is this thought so important? Why
this feeling? Why this state?
It’s rather like this: Let’s say you are looking out the window on
a beautiful spring day, and you are seeing the leaves and branches
of trees, sunlight and billowing clouds and birds. And then you
notice a fly on the window screen. You begin to focus on it and the
more you focus it, the bigger it seems to you. You can narrow
attention so much that it can seem to you that only the fly exists
and the world behind it and around it which you were seeing
previously seems to disappear completely. But if you release the
focusing, the fly doesn’t disappear; instead you see the fly
together with the window, the trees and sky and birds – you see the
fly in context.
Similarly, if you focus on a storyline, the world can seem to
disappear. If you release the focusing, the world seems to come back into view. But of course, the world doesn’t
really “come back into view”. It was and is there all along. And
when you Wake Up from a thought, “you” don’t make the world
reappear. You simply stop focusing and seeing sees.
But whether you choose to sit there focusing on a fly or a thought,
or whether you choose to open around it to see that the fly is
arising together with the whole world, no matter how your attention
is in that moment, the world, the fly, you, the room you are
sitting in and a vast range of other details are all already
present, already occurring simultaneously. Even if you choose to
fold attention down and make yourself stupid, the moment is still
stainless. All you need do is let go of the focusing and openness
is simply how things are.
In reality, you can never be separate from Openness. But you can't
make things open. What you can do is simply release yourself,
whole-bodily into the stainlessness of this moment. You can't
release yourself into stainlessness by thinking about
stainlessness. If you are sitting around thinking about
impermanence, this is “gufu-shogyo-zen” or
“fool's zen”. Emptiness or stainlessness cannot be contained in a
thought because not only is the thought empty, stainlessness itself
is empty. It's not a some “thing” or a something “else”. It is how
everything is and all that you can do is shut up, get out of the
way, and open to it. How do you open to reality? By
practising reality with, as
and through the bodymind. Open to the reality of the sensations of
the breath, the seeing and hearing. Open to what you are
experiencing in this moment. Release attention by opening to
whole-bodily mindfulness and by opening to the details of the
physical space around the bodymind. Align with reality.
In the “Development of Buddhist Psychology” series of classes, the
Roshi says,
The run on from mind moment to mind moment is so
rapid and the interaction between these in terms of content (for
example smelling something, disliking it, blaming someone for
leaving the washroom in such a state, thinking about the person's
other faults and then stubbing one's toes, feeling annoyed about
that and so on) is so rapid that the actual sequence of the shift
from state to state is usually not recognized, let alone the shift
from mind moment to mind moment.
Through attending directly to how we experience
what we experience, it becomes clear that the conventional
understanding of experience is simplistic and primitive because it
takes what is really a process of moments of knowing and constructs
these into monolithic lumps of content. We then begin to stumble
over our own trips about these blocks and structures and feel that
the situation has a permanence about it that makes real change
impossible.
No matter how we might hide in it, no matter how
convinced we might be of this stance, this feeling, this state,
they arise and fall leaving us exposed again and again to
impermanence, to anicca.
When we wallow about in the muck and mire of self-image and act
from the three kleshas of passion, aggression and stupidity, our
perception of ourselves and the world around us becomes entangled
and obstructed. Experiencing becomes piled up and bundled together
in tight, brittle formations of distorted thoughts and feeling
tones. Like Jigsaw pieces of that don't fit together, but
are forced into shapes to form bleak pictures. And when this
happens, we talk endlessly to ourselves about who we are: seeking
out blackness, calculating, mapping, propagating a sense of problem
and separation. But as it says in a chant
written by Joshu Dainen zenji,
Attention, attention.
All is always stainless,
each form is always formless.
Aligning ourselves with the Way,
each dharma is always Buddha Dharma.
The stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and the world
around us form as the congealing of attention into “views” of this
and that, but all around these “views”, the world extends in all
directions. It is only through focusing and narrowing attention and
choosing to ignore the context in which a thought is taking place
that we can convince ourselves that any view is true, is final, is
justified.
If you saw someone sitting in the middle of the road, talking to
themselves, hitting themselves with a rock, you might say “Stop
talking to yourself. Look where you are.” You would recognize very
clearly that such behavior is completely insane. But when you are
sitting on your zafu, you are doing much the same thing if you are
not opening to reality and are instead talking to yourself,
torturing yourself with your storylines.
Not long after I began practicing as a student of the Roshi near 17
years ago, I saw someone on a crowded street who made quite a
strong impression. It was summer so he was wearing shorts and a
T-shirt. But in addition he was wearing an assortment of bags,
many, many bags with many many straps crisscrossing his body. And
from these bags protruded an assortment of gadgets and wires. He
had such things as phones, transistor radios, and many other small
items I couldn't identify – dozens of them. From these ran many
cables and wires which were also looped around his body. He really
was quite an alarming sight and people on the street gave him a
wide berth as he looked like a walking bomb, armed and ready to go
off at any moment. Except that the majority of his electronic
devices were obviously so dinged up that they couldn't possibly
work. Completely oblivious to the reactions of those around
him, he stopped at a bench and sat down. As I was waiting for a
store to open I stood not far away observing him for ten or fifteen
minutes as he disconnected and re-connected wires, but it was
apparent that nothing would or could work.
I remember being very struck by this man and had various thoughts
about how he could have come to be in such a such a sorry state. I
was looking at him, and then looking at me, and then looking at
everyone else as it dawned on me that through focusing attention,
he had become someone obsessed with fixing his own wiring. And that
anyone, anywhere, can be equally disconnected from reality through
focusing attention. And then I flashed on the range of thoughts,
feelings, storylines that I had seen come up for me even while
sitting on the zafu and realized that these – these thoughts and
feelings and storylines, propagating them, rehearsing them, going
over them again and again and again was what caused “me” to
crystallize into what I think of as “me” and that all of this stuff
must be questioned and released. What seems “normal” is simply what
becomes habitual.
As it says in the Jijiyu Zanmai Doka, “Don't follow and become the
forms of attention.”
We begin practising because we recognize that something about us
should change, though we're not necessarily all that clear about
what that is. Regardless of what we want to change or how we want
it to change or the fact that what we want to change keeps
changing, one thing is clear: we want change. We might start off
practicing thinking that we want to change one or two details, a
couple of things we don't like about ourselves, but we'll keep the
rest. So we try to practice on our own terms, try to bend the
practice into a shape that is acceptable to us. We focus on what we
like or don't like, but as we
continue to practise, what we
begin to discover is that it isn't just what we perceive to be the
ugly, gristly, uncomfortable bits that need change, everything
needs to change. And as it changes, what it changes into also needs
to be released to allow a space for further change The stuff we are
“comfortable” with is just as bizarre as the stuff we are
“uncomfortable” with.
Much of what we do when we first start practising is basically
swapping one state for another. A state comes up that we don't like
and then we pump up a feeling of openness to counter it. We get
lost in thought and noticing that, don't like what we see so we
attempt to pump up a state of silence (a jhana state) to counter
that. But once in a while we actually remember to practise the
instructions to actually feel the breath, the body, open to seeing
and hearing. At first, we keep checking to see what the practice is
doing for us, wondering how we are “progressing”, but eventually we
realize that all of this self-considering must also be released.
Trying to measure one's practice is a bit like running around the
back yard with a wooden ruler trying to measure the sun or the
moon. If you notice you are doing this, stop talking to
yourself about yourself and
practise. Why? Because the
moment is measureless but fleeting and you are wasting time.
When the Roshi says “If it is closed, open around it; if it seems
open, open further”, he is instructing us to open to the
stainlessness of this moment in this moment. This is real change.
What does he mean by “open around it”? He means that you should use
the noticing of any detail of experiencing as a reminder to release
the tendency to focus on that detail and open to the context in
which that detail is taking place. If you are focusing on a
thought, a feeling, one sound amidst countless sounds you are
hearing, one aspect of the visual field amidst the countless
details you could be seeing, open attention around that one
thing by coming back to the
practise of whole-bodily
mindfulness, open seeing, open hearing. What the Roshi is
talking about is releasing habitual thoughts and feelings and the
movements of attention associated with them into stainlessness,
opening and opening further, not stopping anywhere, not settling,
not making yourself comfortable.
The truly odd thing is that when we become contracted, we really
think no one else can see how we are; that no one else can see or
feel how we distort and crunch our attention, that no one else can
see or feel the circle of sharp knives we slash ourselves and
others with. But the truth of the matter is that we are
broadcasting how we are all of the time and if we settle into and
propagate a state, it will make itself known. Nothing is separate
from anything else. Everything arises together, at the same time,
and each thing interpenetrates every other thing in the
stainlessness of this moment. All around the states you experience,
the world extends in all directions, but when you bask in a state
all that you will let yourself see is the state. Don't be stupid.
Open around it. Stop talking to yourself about what you think and
feel about everything. If you were as interesting as you think you
are, you wouldn't bore yourself so much when you sit.
Each day the sun rises and sets; the moon appears and vanishes as
the sun rises again. The sky is blue and bright and then clouds
gather and shower the earth with rain or snow or hail. The earth
shifts, mountain ranges grow and recede, shorelines change. Beings
are born and die, wave after wave after wave of beings coming and
going. What could be solid in any of this? How could you be
solid when your experience shows you the obvious impermanence of
all things? How could it be possible that any state you experience
could be solid in the midst of all of this impermanence?
I was once speaking with the Roshi about my father, now long dead,
about his life, the things he thought important and commented on
how strange it is that we struggle and endure and hope and fear and
in the end nothing remains. The Roshi said , “Like an equation
written on water, vanishing even as it's being written”.
Zazen is not just a matter of changing this or that about
ourselves. It exposes us to and reveals the fact that change is
what we always already are.
I speak and my words are already gone. You don't need to chase
after them because you've already understood what you understood in
the moment they were spoken. You see the wall, but there is no need
for attention to move out and towards the wall, no need for you to
try to “organize” the seeing. Just see. You don't need to look
further into that moment of seeing because that moment is already
gone and you've already seen. You don't need to find “meaning” in
what was seen because meaning was already apparent and now there is
THIS moment of seeing. It is what it is. It IS the wall. Open to
peripheral vision. Just see. You feel sensations, but attention
does not need to follow them. Just feel. You notice a thought and
you don't need to look further into it. Just open to the experience
of whole bodymind sitting on the cushion. Now. And now. Pleasant
sensations, unpleasant sensations are felt, bright, distinct, gone.
And now? What does it actually feel like to sit here in this moment
of stainlessness?
All experiences are stainless when attention is not distorted. All
dharmas arise, dwell and decay as one's world. Penetrate each
moment of experiencing. Penetrate this moment of breathing;
penetrate this wall, this floor, this mind, this world. When you
get up from the zafu and walk, you are still walking in this world.
All beings are met, all events are rising and falling and this
penetration into one's world is the essence of our practice. Our
practice is not separate from the world. Our practice is the
practise of mind stainlessly
arising as world and world stainlessly arising as mind.
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