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M 41 Bodhidharma Sat Facing The Wall |
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(an article by Albert Low ) |
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The second Patriarch having cut off his arm stood there in the snow. The broken tooth old foreigner crossed the seas importantly from a hundred thousand miles away. This was raising waves when there was no wind. Bodhidharma had only one disciple and even he had only one arm. Well, well. Coming from the West and directly pointing. All the truth comes from that. The jungle of monks being at sixes and sevens comes from these two chaps. This case, in a way, sums up the human situation as well as the awakened response to it. The koan says, the second Patriarch, having cut off his arm, stood there in the snow and said, "Your disciple's mind has no peace as yet." One cannot help comparing what the second patriarch did to the 1914-18 war, which was supposed to be a war to end wars. The second Patriarch went through that tremendous struggle in order to put an end to struggle. This kind of paradox has haunted the human condition from the very beginning. The first noble truth of Buddhism declares that life is suffering. The second noble truth declares that the cause of suffering is desire the third noble truth affirms that there is an end to suffering. What kind of end to suffering would this be? The religious quest has been the quest for the end to suffering, and in this quest human beings have gone in two different directions . “Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you.” This is this peace that the second Patriarch cries out for. It is the peace that we all long for. On another occasion Christ said, "Come to me all who labour and are heavily burdened and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. I'm gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light." “I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls.” “Rest for our souls,” is this not what we wish for ourselves and others: that they rest in peace? Indeed that we and they rest in eternal peace? "There is that sphere wherein is neither earth nor water, fire nor air. It is neither the infinity of space nor the infinity of perception. It is not nothingness nor is it idea or non idea. It is neither this world nor the next. Nor is it both. It is neither the sun nor the moon. It neither comes nor goes. It neither abides nor passes away. It is not caused, established, begun, supported. It is the end of suffering." But then the Prajnaparamita, one of the most important scriptures of Mahayana Buddhism says, "Just so, the Bodhisattva when he comprehends the dharmas as he should, does not retire into blessed rest. In prajna then he dwells. "
The bodhisattva “Does not retire into blessed rest.” If that is so, then what is the aim of our practice? Why are we practicing? One way in which we can make the distinction between the two directions that religion has gone in the quest for peace is that one goes along the path in the hope of finding peace. The other goes along the path in the hope of seeing that he or she is peace. Speaking more technically, one could say that the one wants to go on the path of samadhi. The other is on the path of awakening. This means that the first wants to get away from suffering. But to do son one must want to get away from the world and, ultimately, away from life itself. This is the Hinayana goal of wanting to get off the wheel of birth and death. The way of awakening is the way into life. It's the way of seeing that everyday mind is the way. This means that it is the way through suffering. A Christian saying affirms, "If you knew how to suffer, you would have the power not to suffer." This was put more poetically by T.S. Elliot's in his poem "Four Quartets" in which he says, Pyre as you know is a sacrificial fire. And we can choose whether to suffer and in the midst of that suffering dream of some escape. Or we can choose suffering. Bodhidharma wrote "The Four Ways" and one is The Way of Seeking. And he says, When one is looking into this question "Who am I?" we have said there are two ways in which one can work. One is to ask oneself something similar to how do I know that I am I or me? Or how do I know that I am? It's for some people enough. This sort of opening beyond any kind of opening. Before any thought arises, what are you? But the other way is to see into this everyday I. This I that is always there when you're with friends or whether with your family, with your coleagues, with people in the street, shop people, the bank. And this I is craving. It is always craving. And if one wants to see into it, then one of the most direct routes is to see it as craving. "People of the world are always mixed up, craving everything, grasping all the time. This is called seeking. The wise awaken to the real. Relying upon inner truth they are nevertheless with the world. Flexible and adjusting to all conditions, they are freed from the myriad states and there is nothing wished for to take joy in. Along with this, the darkness of meritorious deeds is done away with forever." And then he says, All who have bodies suffer. Who can ever find peace? This having a body, whose body is it that you have? You say my body but whose body is it that you have? When were you given this body and by whom? Is it possible that this 'my body' is already the first craving? The result of the first craving? The first craving to be something? Is it possible that if one really looked at this notion of my body, my thoughts, my feelings, that we might see that there is a claim that is, in a way, illicit? But if we look into this 'my body' one sees in that very claim a craving. A craving to be. As Bodhidharma says, this is like living in a house that is on fire. He says, "The wise awaken to the real, relying upon inner truth. They are nevertheless with the world." Is there a difference between saying, I'm in the world and I'm with the world? Is there a fundamental difference of attitude in that? How do we awaken to the real? Of course, there is a price to pay. A price of great effort. But we have to recognize that this effort is not the effort to satisfy a desire. This is one of the mistakes that people make when they criticize Rinzai Zen, when saying it's a way of too much effort, too much striving, too much greed. Grab, grab, grab is the way one Soto person put it to me. And if indeed we are striving to satisfy our greed for peace then they are justified. There's a quotation from Bradley which bears on this. He talks about the ghosts of metaphysic. This is a way of talking about awakening to the real as Bodhidharma uses the expression. The victim whose life they have drained... In Zen, this is called exhausting all the resources of your being. And this exhausting all the resources of your being is to exhaust all the greed including the greed for peace. Including, in other words, the greed to end the fires of greed. The way of samadhi is the way of no ambiguity. It is the way of unity. It is the way of peace. It's the way of finding peace. But the way of Zen is the way into ambiguity. It is not the way to certainty. It is the way to flexibility. As Bodhidharma says, "flexible and adjusting to all conditions." It is letting go the stopping mind. We spoke about the stopping mind yesterday. And the stopping mind is the mind that wants rest. It wants to stop. There use to be that saying in the 60's "Stop the world, I want to get off!" Bradley goes on, he says, "The person whose nature is such that by one path alone his/her desire will reach consumation will try to find it on that path whatever it might be and whatever the world thinks of it. And if he does not, he is contemptable." There is only one path. This comes out in the 48th koan in which it says, "The Bhaghavats of the ten directions teach only one path." What is that one path? And there is one path alone by which we can find peace and that is by letting go of this search for peace. In the workshop we tell people that there is no original sin but there is something very similar to it which is the klesa of ignorance. And the klesa of ignorance is the klesa... and as you know klesa means that which creates pain. The klesa of ignorance is to turn our back on our true nature. And the search for peace is a way by which we turn our back on our true nature. And so therefore we turn our back on peace because our true nature is peace. It's like Nisargadatta said, "My body is peace." So the one path alone by which one will find a consumation of the desire for peace is to let go of that path. He says, "Self sacrifice is too often the great sacrifice of trade, the giving cheap what is worth nothing." Because so often, in the search for peace we give up things that we desire. Some people even go so far as to give up a whole way of life. Become something like a hermit. Other people chisel away at here and there, making little self sacrifices, making little fasts and so on. And he says, "this is a sacrifice of trade", if I give up this I'll get back a little bit of peace. "The giving cheap what is worth nothing." He says, "To know what one wants and to scrupple at no means that will get it may be a harder self surrender." So what is it that you want? What is it that you want? This first of all is the requirement. This first of all you must come to. Or perhaps you might even ask what is it you don't want? This also can be salutary. But then one must scrupple at no means that will get it. If you want to be peace, you must give up the desire for peace. And the desire for peace is what we call I. See into the I as desire. When we do this, when we start letting go of the very source of this greed then we get into what we have called the desert. Because the desert is not only an absence of desire but the source of that desire has also become attenuated. It's lost its power. And so often there is that sense of impotence, of powerlessness, of not even being able to do the practice. Particularly if the practice itself has been motivated by desire. When we first start practice, we come in with great hope, great expectation. Expectation itself is an interesting word because it means ex: outside, and spectare: to look. To look outside. And when we first start practicing we have many hopes for the future. And we look outside a great deal. We have many expectations. And these mingled together produce certain extatic states in us. There is a sense of at last getting somewhere. There is a feeling that our desire to be and to be in an absolute way will at last be satisfied. There is a swelling inside us. A kind of inflation. We feel a certain kind of power. Very often we have a feeling of benevolence that goes with this and we feel at last we can love, we can love the world. And this is what in christianity is called being given consolations. It's not infrequent that people will get samadhi states during this time. They will get moments by which they do experience peace. And after that all they want and all they practice for is to rediscover that moment of samadhi, that moment of peace. But then, and I'm going to read from St-John, "God turns all this light of their's into darkness and shuts against them the door and the source of the sweet spiritual water which they were tasting in God when soever and for as long as they desired." That sweetness that comes with holy practice is no more. And it is not infrequent that people come and they say, "It used to be good. My practice used to be really good practice but it's no good anymore." Actually, people leave at this time. "That's not for me" they say. They go somewhere else. But St-John goes on and says, "And thus He leaves them completely in the dark, that they know not where to go with their sensible imagination and meditation. For they cannot advance a step in meditation as they were wempt to do before." Now there's nothing going on in their practice. They're not able to go forward and they heart back at the times where there was all of this sweetness and light. They may have been going through a great deal of grief or distress but nevertheless it was sweet distress. It was distress in the name of God and salvation. But now the distress is no longer sweet. "For they cannot advance a step in meditation as they could before. Their inward senses being submerged in this night and left with such dryness that not only do they experience no pleasure and consolation in spiritual things and good exercises wherein they use to find their delight and pleasure but instead, on the contrary they find insipidity and bitterness in the said things pleasure." In other words, where they once found this sweetness, this light, this sense of," at last!", this feeling of hope, of expectations being fulfilled, "they're left with such dryness that not only do they experience no pleasure and consolation in the spiritual things but instead they find insipidity and bitterness." This greed for eternal rest is drying up but with it is the eternal rest that they expected, hoped, indeed demanded to find. He goes on and says, "Because of this dryness and aridity spiritual people suffer by reason, not so much of the aridities, of the dryness they suffer as of the fear that they have of being lost on the road, thinking that all spiritual blessing is over for them and that God has abandoned them since they can find no help or pleasure in good things." This is really the pain that many people have. It's not only or not simply the pain, that seering pain of that lunar landscape of practice that they have to go across hour after hour but it's this sense of not path, of no way out, of having been abandoned, of there being no possibility, after all, to find the peace they so urgently desire. Practice is purgation. Purgation means to purge. And to purge means to purify. Purgatory was always looked upon as a fire, purgatorial fire. And it was always felt that one had to pass through purgatorial fire in order to pass into Heaven. But people feel that to pass through this purgatorial fire is a mistake. That somehow, they should be able to get into Heaven on a free ticket and not past through the struggle that it requires. Let us remember that the struggle is not the struggle for peace. But it is the struggle with the source of the desire for peace. One of the ways in which we can do this, and the way that we often recommend is the way of longing. This is particularly true if one is working on these koans Who or Mu. Because if one allows the longing to increase without any hope, without any desire, without any searching for means to satisfy it, it in itself will become a purgatorial fire. But unfortunately it so often happens that people turn this very practice into another instrument of I. They use longing as a practice. "The second Patriarch having cut off his arm..." in other words, this is the measure of his need for peace that he would go to that extreme "The second Patriarch having cut off his arm stood there in the snow". Again, to stand there in the snow, what a drive there must have been! What a need he must have had! And he says, "Your disciple's mind has no peace as yet. I beg the teacher give it rest." |
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