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

Teisho © Rafe Martin 2012

Enlightenment is the core of . 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 , 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 go- ing. 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 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 en- tirely 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 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 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 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 dif- ferent. 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 reali- zation, complete peace, and ease. Instead, he devotes his next fifty years of life to walking the dusty roads, teaching those who while in reality, as complete and whole as he, don’t yet know it.

So how did he know it? Like this – just prior to the moment of enlightenment, after the Buddha-to-Be’s six years of exhaustive effort, (and endless kalpas of jataka prac- tice-exertions), going the limit, trying and trying with all he had, drawing on the power of all his previous efforts, his countless failures and triumphs, Mara the Bud- dhist Tempter, or Distracter – in short, the inner voice of ego – finally takes off all his masks and nakedly appears. Mara is worried. He (or she’s or It’s) begun to see that Siddhartha may actually escape from even the most subtle nets of self-centered error and fully realize, that is awaken to the innate shared by us and all beings. Desperate, Mara makes a last-ditch effort to turn the once sheltered, but now deeply determined ex-prince from his goal. He pulls the ace in the hole – self- doubt, the doubt we all carry: “What? I have this True Nature? It is me? And I can realize it?”

This doubt makes us cling to belief in the solidity of a forever separate, winning- losing self. It is a root belief gluing us to what is only provisionally real. Mara con- fronts the Buddha-to-Be and asks, “How could you, a sheltered ex-prince, be worthy of the Supreme Goal of complete and perfect enlightenment? Come on. Get real. Bet- ter men than you have aimed for this and failed. Better women, too. You’re young and just a beginner to boot. Pride makes you think you can do this. Give yourself a few more lifetimes to work at it. Then you might have a chance. You’ve got the basic ability sure, but now? No way. Back off and take it slow.” It’s a reasonable request and reasonable advice; reasonable as all get-out, an argument devilishly reasonable. Take it easy. Be careful. Go slow and steady. Prepare yourself.

At this potentially crucial juncture, with worlds hanging in the balance, Siddhartha doesn’t waste breath arguing with the habit voice of his own inner separateness, his own predilection towards self-centeredness, or ego. He doesn’t even try to put to- gether a reasonably winning answer. To enter the argument is to have already lost. Ready? Not ready? A self that gains? A self that loses? A self that’s ready? A self that’s not ready? He didn’t get pulled in to Mara’s challenge and metaphor. Instead, probably seeing the joke, he simply smiled. Then he reached down and touched the earth on which he was sitting, and let the earth be his witness and speak for him.

And what happened? The earth replied with thousands of voices, voices of rivers, mountains, stones, animals, plants, trees, and people all speaking as if they were one, thundering that there was not a single spot on the globe where, in some past life, this seemingly young, sheltered ex-prince hadn’t already given himself totally, in all-consuming efforts for the sake of perfectly, totally clear, no falling back enlightenment and for the welfare of all suffering beings, sentient and non-sentient alike.

Mara is shocked, overwhelmed, and thoroughly defeated. His last effort to tempt the Buddha-to-Be to falter, to cling to the limited viewpoint of an isolated “me in here, everything and everyone else out there” was crushed. The earth had spoken at a touch, confirming worth beyond measure.

Touching the earth is touching the ground, the clay, the foundation of who and what we are. Of dust we are made. Adam, first man, gets his name from adamah – He- brew for “earth.” “Human” is from the latin humanus – “groundling.” Touching the ground is touching the ground – of being. Of Being Us. “Sesshin” – the Japanese term for a longer Zen retreat – means to “touch the mind,” the ground of our being. We sit for days and get grounded . Which means touching our ordinary nature, ordi- nary mind. Acknowledging and accepting ourselves all the way down, including past errors and efforts, we let our own jataka past, our own many births and lives – which could simply mean those that have occurred in this lifetime, confirm us. Childhood, youth, maturity, jobs, relationships, children, gains and losses – haven’t these been our route to this present moment, this present person? Everything changes. Yet something abides. What is that? Touch that ground is what Zen says.

The jataka tales are the record of the Buddha’s own unique practice history. It is a particularly long history, said to go back eons, world ages, Big Bangs. But we, too, according to classical Buddhist tradition, each have a jataka history of our own, built of thoughts, deeds and events that testify to our nature. We can accept those that reach back into our childhoods easily enough. Zen practice or any form of paying at- tention really, makes this clear. Things happened that made us who we are. We stumbled, scratched our knees, literally and metaphorically, we banged our heads, literally and metaphorically, got up, let the wound scab over, and tried again. Some- times we triumphed. Sometimes we met sorrows.

But perhaps we can also accept that, as with the Buddha, our own history may also extend back through ages. Where does the path of causation that unfolds as each plant, bug, animal, bird, us, begin? Can anyone say? This need not be upheld as some grand ideal, but simply as the root of who and what we are. Our interest in music or literature or cooking or Zen – did it come from genes, ancestral experience and predilections woven into our DNA, or from unknown past lives? From what ground do they arise? Ordinary life, and ordinary mind are wonderfully mysterious just as they are. I’m not saying we need to believe in past lives. Just that we be aware and see that this very moment has its own of causes and effects. As ’s “One-Mind Precepts,” traditionally examined at the conclusion of koan training puts it, “Self-Nature is inconceivably wondrous.” That is, our nature, the very nature that’s sitting here right now hearing sounds, feeling sensations, thinking thoughts is inconceivably wondrous.

As inconceivably wondrous as our nature is, it’s not an ideal we might, if we’re lucky, one day attain. True-nature is who we are. Why else was the sky so blue when we were children, and why the grass so green? The mysterious, empty ground of be- ing has been our support throughout the endless past, as it is right now at this mo- ment. The literal ground we walk on is full of microbes, germs, and bugs. Mind- ground is full of doubts, problems, fears, pride, worries, errors, and regrets. So we sit again and again, follow or count the breath, examine a koan, make vows over and over and work, day by day to uphold the precepts. For, while our True-Nature is, in reality, always there, the ox of the mind likes to wander. Until it’s trained, it can be a formidable beast, going where we’d rather it didn’t, running into thickets and for- ests, breaking down fences to tear up gardens. Neither the ground beneath us nor Mind in which thoughts arise, are sanitized or safe. Do we really want them to tes- tify for us? (As an aside, years ago I heard a story from my teacher, Danan Henry Roshi, founder of the Zen Center of Denver. He was speaking about a French women he’d met who had done the traditional three year, three month, three week, three day retreat of committed Tibetan Buddhist practice. No mean feat. She emerged successfully, open and aware, yet said, in a charming French accent, that she was surprised to find that her mind was “still naughty.”)

When we were children we could stretch out fearlessly on this dirty, fertile ground. We could roll on it, lie on it to gaze up at clouds, sky, and birds. We could pick up dirt, rub it into our jeans and hands and hair and come home shining. When did we become afraid to touch the earth? When did we start to think we were too good for it, that it was not just our support, but “beneath us?” When we were young we ex- plored our minds effortlessly, too, fearlessly experimenting with sounds, shapes, col- ors, movements, emotions, health, sickness, ideas, as well as internal narratives and voices. When did we learn to fear our own nature?

At his moment of final challenge the Buddha touched the earth. He didn’t reach for the sky and beg for help from something or someone above. He didn’t get sucked in to Mara’s metaphor and try to win the debate and out-argue the Distracter. No. He simply touched the always present, selfless ground and found what is “eternal, joy- ous, selfless, pure” as the “Kanzeon” proclaims. For the Earth Mother, the founda- tion of our own ordinary daily being, answered saying, “It’s not the first time. He’s earned great worth by his own past efforts. It is the right time. This moment is the culmination. So many, many selfless efforts have come before. I am the eternal wit- ness to the endless chain of cause and effect. The time is now.”

What makes it such a truly lovely story is that it’s not ancient history. It’s our story, too. This moment is itself part of the ongoing jataka series of the un-fully-realized Buddhas we each are. Essential nature, the ground beneath us, is always here, life after life, moment after moment, breath after breath, thought after thought. Past lives inevitably lead to present ones, to this one in which we now sit, walk, stand, speak, eat, work, worry, create, hear, cough, pick our noses. Come day’s end, we say “good night,” and lie down with and on the ground of our nature, the ground we practice from, have always been standing on, whether we knew it or not. We, too, will touch base with it and let it speak for and confirm us. Our fundamental vow as human beings, is to know ourselves. This is why we practice. It is the guarantee that one day we will realize it. If like the Buddha, we keep at it. Roshi Kapleau used to say the vow to become a Buddha is our nature, exactly like the vow the peach-pit takes to become a peach. The Buddha’s touching the earth at the moment of enlight- enment reminds us that we, too, have already entered the stream that inevitably leads to Realization of the Way.

When we come to our mat in the zendo we bow to it. Then we turn and bow to the community of fellow sitters. This is our acknowledgement of the mythos. This cush- ion is our spot beneath the Bodhi-tree. This spot we sit is the center of the universe. It is where our Buddha work gets done. But, unlike the Buddha, who first opened the gate, we don’t have to do it alone. We can sit with others. We have . This is the gift, too, of the Buddha’s realization and springs from his post-enlightenment teaching.

Zen Master Dogen famously wrote out the central realization of Zen practice in just a few well-chosen words: “When the self advances and confirms the 10,000 things it is called delusion. When the 10,000 things advance and confirm the self it is called enlightenment.”

The ten thousand things are birds, bugs, clouds, mountains, rivers, people, animals, traffic sounds, cell phones, raindrops, pebbles, clumps of earth, and shining morning stars. Ordinary things confirm us, tell us who we are, everyday. In reality, there is no barrier between us, and a single thing, not even as much as a single hair or speck of dust. The morning star shines in. Raindrops fall in. Clouds drift in. The dog barks. Woof! Woof! A child laughs. The heating pipes clang. That’s it. That’s all! How wonderful. How blessed. Another word for enlightenment is intimacy. This is not cleverness or serendipity. It is the actual nature of things. The very real etymo- logical meaning of the word, “enlightenment” is just this – “intimacy.” Touching the ground means we realize our intimacy with everyone and everything.

Case 20 of the Shoyoroku or Book of Serenity koan collection, much regarded by the Soto school of Zen, goes like this:

Jizo asked Hogen, “What are you up to these days?”

Hogen said, “I am wandering at random.”

Jizo said, “What do you expect from wandering?”

Hogen said, “I don’t know”.

Jizo said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

Hogen was suddenly enlightened.

Touching the earth is always possible, wonderful intimacy is always possible, be- cause our ground, our own vast empty nature, is never, ever far away. As to what that experience is like, let’s turn to our good friend of the West, William Blake, for closing words.

To see a world in a grain of sand, A heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, Eternity in an hour.

Whenever and wherever we touch this common ground, East or West, it is December 8th , the morning star shines, and we are home.

Or, how about this: “Sit on Mother Earth, like a child in a mother’s lap. We are made from her, Mother Earth. No matter what tribe or nation, we are from the earth and we will be coming part of her again.” ~Sam Benally, Navajo Elder