Touching the Earth, Seeing the Morning Star” December 8, 2012

“Touching the Earth, Seeing the Morning Star” December 8, 2012 Teisho © Rafe Martin 2012 Enlightenment is the core of Zen. Gaining some calm and experiencing peaceful sitting is certainly also very good. No doubt about it. Just look at the madness of our world. People act as if crazed. And they are. Their minds are without peace. But if peace were all that Siddhartha was looking for, he would never have needed to leave home. Or he could have stopped off at any local forest retreat and settled there. But those choices didn’t work for him. They weren’t enough. Having truly realized impermanence, the insubstantiality of every person and every thing, a fire was lit in his mind. He had to keep going until he could touch real ground, that is, realize, awaken to, his own nature, “eternal, joyous, selfless, pure” as “the Kan- zeon” says. To do that, we have to keep going. Or to quote one of my favorite books of old tales, Irish Fairy Tales by James Stephens, who wrote at the time of Yeats and Joyce, “Still, if you keep on driving a pig or a story they will get at last to where you wish them to go, and the man who keeps putting one foot in front of the other will leave his home behind, and will come at last to the sea and the end of the world.” So the Buddha not just in that last life, but through countless previous ones, kept going – as the jataka tales reveal. Actually in the jatakas the Buddha is shown as having had some realization of essen- tial nature, or own nature or, kensho as it is called in Zen, many times. That is, he had intimately already seen into the living reality of selflessness, of wisdom and compassion, into the identity of form and emptiness, relative and Absolute over the course of many past lives. He’d already been, we might say, a Zen student, lay and ordained many times, a Vajryana student, a hermit monk, a wandering sadhu, a Theravadin, as well as having countless lives of basic ethical practice as human or animal. Buddhist tradition says he always chose to go further, over the next hill, be- yond the next river, through the next dark forest. And so can we. It is our human nature expressing itself. Onward! Further! And even kensho, glimpsing reality, is not the end, not where we settle down and say, “Ok! Now I’ve got it!” Many koans point out the serious limitations, the very big mistake of such limited thinking. Touching the ground is simply a beginning. It is like walking through a door, or opening our eyes and saying, “Oh, here’s the ground. My goodness how simple! I get it.” And then we can go on in our journey from there with that basic reality now the foundation of the ever-changing landscape of cloud and sunlight, night and day, summer and winter, ups and downs, highs and lows, easy and difficult of ordinary, actually more-than-ever entirely ordinary, life. Yet Zen reveres the Buddha’s enlightenment because it dramatically marks the path of our own potential to realize ourselves and experience the non-dual, vast, empty of ground of our ordinary daily reality. It is the hero or heroine’s quest. And it shows, too, and importantly, the persistence, the effort, of preparing and being present to everything that that underlies such culminating experiences. Roshi Kapleau used to say, “There’s nothing you need to believe in Zen. No dogma. Except to have some faith in the fact that when the Buddha exclaimed, ‘Wonder of wonders! All beings are Buddha, fully endowed with wisdom and virtue,’ he wasn’t a liar or a fool. What then did he mean? People seem anything but wise and virtuous. What did he mean? That’s where our practice digs in. Anyone who has been practicing for years, cross- ing their legs, continuing at it even in the most desultory on-again, off-again way, has faith in this un-nameable something, knows the same hunger and yearning that drew prince Siddhartha from the safety of his sheltered home. Anyone who has been coming regularly to sit anywhere, is being drawn by that something, a rising into consciousness of Self-nature, which like a chick in an egg, a child in the womb is turning toward the light of day and its own birth. Dokusan is for such people, those who have been sitting and those who have begun and who are keeping at it in the midst of life. It can be a way of touching base, for teacher and practioner to line up and begin working together to help the journey find its own legs or wings, or just simply, like a chick flopping raw and wet out of the egg, to unfold. There are pointers to practice throughout the traditional narrative of the Buddha’s awakening. Though the ex-Prince sat and sat, it wasn’t enough. There was a trigger to his Aha ! experience – oh, that bright morning star! Realization didn’t just come from quietly looking within. He glanced up and suddenly – as if for the first time – saw the morning star. That once distant bright star – the planet Venus actually walked in and that’s when he realized, “ Aha !” Then a morning star sat on eight bundles of grass beneath the Tree and realized itself. And that was it. Gone gone entirely gone, as the famous Prajna Paramita Hridaya, Heart of Perfect Wisdom puts it. No one seeing is real seeing. Just star ! Or as the great T’ang era Chinese Zen poet Li Po wrote: The birds have vanished into the sky, and now the last cloud drains away. We sit together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains. Here’s another point. The Buddha-to-Be didn’t just sit there quietly. He responded . When Mara appeared and challenged him, he didn’t ignore it. When situations arise in our lives we, too, can’t just sit till they’re gone. There is a time to act. It need not be a big deal. It need not be dramatic. The Buddha just reached out and gently touched the earth, and Mara’s whole world was overturned, overwhelmed, crushed. He didn’t argue. It was a simple gesture but a non-dualistic one. There’s that little lovely touch of myth, too. Kala Naga Raja the Black Snake King raises his ancient hooded head and, “Lo!” linear time falls away. For a timeless instant, we are in the inconceivability of timelessness. And that bowl forging upstream against the current reminds us that we must go against the current, too, against the endless flow of thoughts, concepts, ideas that form a veil between us and this breeze, this breath, this whirr and clang of heating pipes, if we, too, would wake up. The Buddha’s enlightenment story is part of the classical canon and is, at the same time, a demon- stration of the living heart of our own practice. For Buddhist tradition, Zen tradition, says that we all have the nature of Buddha, have exactly the same vast, empty nature, full of creative potential and that from the first, we are each fully and equally endowed with the same limitless wisdom and compassion as a Shakyamuni. And because it is already who we are, if we practice, if we make the effort then, we, too, can realize what is already there. Enlightenment is simply being able to attest to it, not gain it. It can’t be gained because it has never been lost. Zen’s point is quite clear. Roshi Kapleau’s point was clear. If we, too, are this enlightened nature where is it right now? And why don’t we know it? Eventu- ally we find that we begin boring into this with a whole heart and mind, like some- one drilling deep for water. Not blindly. A sonar survey has shown that the water is there, deep underground. We, too, have a map, not blind belief. Our Dharma Ances- tors tell us that all the water we will ever need is already there flowing underground beneath our feet. With this in mind we keep at it. We sit and sit, walk into dokusan, listen to teisho, examine the precepts in our daily lives, follow the breath, count the breath, return to the koan point. Of course, for the Buddha, the ex-Prince, in this final touching-the-earth-moment, the enlightenment he realized came after countless lifetimes of dedicated practice, of steady drilling. His enlightenment was complete, every level of character and mind fully realized. In substance every kensho, the small kind we’re likely to realize, and the Buddha’s great enlightenment are the same. But in content they are vastly different. Buddhist mythos says that in this world age no one experienced more deeply than Shakyamuni. With one touch he touched not only the ground but the bottom- less bottom, and the soaring heights. It would be like comparing the finger painting of a kindergartener with a work by Rembrandt or Picasso. The substance is the same. Both are paintings. But the degree of conscious realization is vastly different. The Buddha’s story, his home leaving and forest path exertions, his abandonment by his ascetic disciples and his solitary facing of Mara — the primordial forces of his – and our – innate ignorance – completes his long jataka path. Touching the ground at last and seeing the morning star, he then gets up and walks on, transcending the final temptation to just sit in complete enjoyment, complete freedom, complete realization, complete peace, and ease.

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