Soen Master Ko Bong’s Three Gates

Gate 1
 The sun shines everywhere. Why does a cloud obscure the sun?

Lance Kinseth, Why Does A Cloud Obscure The Sun, 1997

Gate 2
 Everyone has a shadow following him. How can you not step on your shadow?

Lance Kinseth, How Can You Not Step On Your Shadow. 1997

Gate 3
 The whole universe is on fire. Through what kind of samadhi can you escape being burned?

Lance Kinseth, How Do You Save Yourself When The Whole World Is On Fire. 1997

Lance Kinseth, How Do You Save Yourself, 2001

ZEN ZA WILD GRASS

Prairie Moon, 2006

MANY APROACHES TO STILLNESS exist, and for a variety of reasons.  Health (both physical and mental), restoration, contemplation, and enhanced awareness perhaps comprise the predominant directives.  And these approaches vary in their effect on the brain as indicated in scans.

Because of the impossibility of finding a boundary,

Za is a pure, unreasoned way, to activate what we are, in intentional stillness and everyday activity.

Buddhism has “housed” a widespread practice termed dhyana, Chan, Soen, Thien, and Zen, but Zen essence is not exclusive to Buddhism.  It is an inherent dimension of human experience. 

The orientation of Zen Za Wild Grass is an intention to enter the most basic moment: Suddenly awakening, what did Siddartha see?

Strip away the ritual, sit, at rest.

ZA: sitting, at rest: a method of opening/access rather than a belief:

Concretely: finding comfort and stimulus reduction—knees down (so sitting on something), hands folded, back straight, ears between shoulders, body wrapped in blankets/cloth, perhaps wall-facing, reduced light.

       Then:

I

FRESH, Fresh, fresh:

Realize

The flow of body and mind

Sitting for just a little time, thought and sensation appear and disappear.

There is this insightful Hinayana sense of (a) sensations and thoughts as well as objects and processes as impermanent and (b) attachment to these experiences causing suffering.  

There can be a problem at this point as meditation is very likely to be viewed as psychological process of “letting go” or “sweeping/cleaning one’s mind” to produce a more tranquil and resilient self.

Sitting longer, meditation offers samadhi, a state that is empty of concepts—luminous, not even present moment.

II

 Body and mind drop away

Experiencing impermanence is not the real step in Zen.  The big change occurs when impermanence is realized to include body and self as a conception.

There is an insightful Mahayana sense of “nothing outside” that challenges self, and accordingly, makes clinging to self—which is impermanent—suffering.  If all is impermanent and our body goes and there is no individual soul to realize, then what are we?

The essence of Zen is actualizing no-self.

Zen Za is Samadhi and satori. Satori/awakening, needs to be perceived directly: what are we?  What is our authentic nature?  The actualization experience is satori that can occur outside seated meditation.

 

No longer psychological, awakening does not provoke the appearance of an enlightened being.  There is no “becoming enlightened.” This is not possible if we actualize what we are.  Inherent enlightenment awakens. That which awakens is everything: many/One as equal, so that a million are also 0.

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky

All beings open their eyes;

Everything under heaven bows together;

Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

Wuman Hui-K’ai

[enlightenment poem, Robert Aitken translation]

Still, Dogen Ekaku admonishes:

No trace of realization remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.

III

Beyond body and mind and oneness

And then, embodying the many/one, actualization, not response as if separate, unable to find boundaries . . .

____________________

Tell Me What This Hand Is

There are moons in this hand. 

There is blossoming in this hand. 

This room is in this hand.

This hand is cloud-filled.  It is rainfall.

There is a sparrow flying in this hand.

There is a photograph and a broom in this hand. 

There is no–hand, no-moon, no-sparrow, no-rain…

AN ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC STUDY ON THE ZEN MEDITATION (ZAZEN)

AN ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAPHIC STUDY ON THE ZEN MEDITATION (ZAZEN)

.    Akira Kasamatsu M.D. andTomio Hirai M.D.

Article first published online: 17 MAR 2008

DOI: 10.1111/j.1440-1819.1966.tb02646.x

Issue

Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences

Volume 20, Issue 4, pages 315–336, December 1966

It’s So Simple / It’s So Beautiful

It’s not za, not oryoki [with “just enough” special food or special bowl or fast speed of eating], not special clothes or okesa [robe] or rakusu, not a committed vow-entrance (jukai), not a name, not a way to enter and to exit zendo, not chants, not prostrations, not sutras—not hidden in process.

In Korea, 1989, at exquisite Bapchusa Temple in Sang-gi National Park, the big outdoor-standing Maitreya Buddha and shrines with seated forms covered in open-faced temples where offerings were made by lay people obscure what Siddhartha saw.

It’s so simple.

You may be looking out the window, and the glass disappears and the bamboo you were looking at is you.  That’s the physical sensation you have.

           

Your realization comes when you see the objective world and realize that it is part of you:  the birds singing, the trees, the mountains, the wind, the sky.  Its all part of you.  This is one realization of truth: You as subject realizes that the object is no other than you.  It’s so beautiful.

The body is the physical self, and when the physical self dies, we cannot see, we cannot hear, our feet can’t run, our hands can’t grasp.  But original mind is still here, and again original mind is the one that ahs been seeing, hearing, laughing, or crying all along.  I know that you still don’t believe me when I say this—no matter what the Dharma says, you find it difficult to believe—but why do you think this?

            ….we have approached with our dualistic, conditioned thinking. But the Dharma is not just a subject to think about.  It is something to directly experience that actualizes the natural radiance of our original mind.

Jakusho Kwong, No Beginning, No End

So simple, yet beyond conceptual: Experiences of “oneness” and conceptual freedom/fluid concepts are still very far away, and still the same old dilemmas and koans that read like puzzles rather than clear answers.  To say that it is simple is really in the sense that E=mc2 or the structure of DNA is simple.

So again and again, way back past the sutras and centuries of discovery, back to the deep source of the human being Siddartha, see what Siddhartha saw—different appearance for you, but the same enduring thing that changes everything.

What appears?

  

Words Cannot Say It

Is it “One Thing,” “All,” “Not Two,” “Limitless”?

Language remains conceptual/conditional, conventional so that it cannot describe that which cannot be labeled.

So, why bother with language if words cannot say it?

Still, if intentionally “turned,” language can point toward that which cannot be labeled:

·     Language can negate, saying not or without or no [i.e., not this,  no end, endless].

·     Language can challenge dualisms/polarities, saying “All things are it,” “This exists because that exists,” “It is inside and outside,” or, for example, that “It stands still and outruns all that are running.”

·     But perhaps in its clearest teaching form, language can skillfully link words that seem disparate: “the limitless is everyday” or “whole body mind seeing” [Dogen] or mix metaphors such as “see sound.”

[Negate, challenge dualisms, link terms: Adapted from lecture by Anantanand Rambachan, Professor of Religion, Philosophy and

Asian Studies at Saint Olaf College, 10/9/2014, Drake University]

Why bother to point toward that which cannot be labeled? 

That which cannot be labeled is not esoteric, not distant.  Suffering develops from the domination of polarity and dualism because it is not the real nature of the world.  It does not actualize who we are.

“Who we are” is inherent in the phenomena/the objective world, the everyday world/the relative world: the clouds and sky, the flower, the dewfall and rain, the snow and frost.  Mountains and oceans and clouds and flowers literally bring us into being, and so they are walking in each of our steps, they are dimensions of self.  We are actualized by the “ineffable” that is expressing the myriad things.

So, in any age, looking at a tree or a leaf or a river or a star, a “turning word” can point something that we can see but not say that is the real working essence of the self/world.

“Elephant” and “house” and “mountain”—“ same” or “different,” “One” or “Two” or “Not Two or “zero”?

Then, seeing elephant or house or mountain, what appears?

Not Leaving Your Life

Not leaving your life,

Leaving your “self”: contextual, conceptual, provisional

Right here, unhidden,

 your true life.

The body of reality is independent, without location,

Whatever strikes the eye is none other than true awakening.

            Pao-chih (Xiujing)

            nirvana/samsara=equal

            ineffable, noumenon/phenomenon=equal

            The body of reality is rarely met,

            and yet, only concealed by dreamlike conceptual discriminations.