Emptiness In Practice, Part 3
The mountain filled with leafless trees
Crisp and clear on this autumn night;
The full moon floating gently above the cluster of roofs,
Having nothing to depend on,
And not clinging to any place;
Free, like the steam rising from a full bowl of rice,
Effortless, as a fish swimming and splashing back and forth,
Like drifting clouds or flowing water.
Eihei Dogen
Over the past few weeks we’ve been exploring ways in which we can practice the theory of emptiness. We considered the concept that everything always is in constant flux and arises from causes and conditions that themselves are constantly changing, without own being and connected to everything else. We practice emptiness by bringing awareness to our default tendency to divide all experience into dualities which gives rise to judgments, positions, opinions, attraction to this, aversion to that, and consequently we suffer and can cause others to suffer.
Last week we practiced emptiness with Nagarjuna’s tetra lemma to challenge our certainties and those concepts we reify and grasp onto as if they make a statement about what we call reality. Our beliefs that arise from self-clinging are often emotionally charged, and practicing with the tetra lemma is an opportunity to rationally investigate what we say we believe. Some of us noticed the liberating quality of dropping a belief that was grasped. We cited Nagarjuna’s admonition: “To believe in emptiness is the biggest mistake of all” and briefly mentioned Joshu’s teaching in Case 2 of The Blue Cliff Record: “I do not abide in clarity.”
You might remember that in August I shared Uchiyama Roshi’s statement: “There is no other person” and this Zen story: A student pleads with her teacher: Please free me! The teacher responds by asking: Who has bound you?
This very short teaching offers us another way to practice emptiness by considering how our tightly held beliefs and assumptions bind us. When I recognize that what I hold as true is simply an assumption that I have fabricated, I can also recognize that I am the person who binds me or who frees me. When I become aware of, really feel how grasping, attachment and aversion, resistance to what is binds me, I can practice emptiness by turning the light inward and acknowledging that the experience I’m experiencing is the five skandhas (body and mind together) seeing the five skandhas (body and mind together). No other person but this entity I call me: ever-changing, not fixed, empty of permanent inherent selfhood. When I recognize that I bind myself, only I can let go of a me I think I am and open to bodhichitta, the intention to practice the precepts and vows for the benefit of all being. Then instead of carrying the self forward, life realizes me in miraculous myriad forms and I respond with love.
Kosho Uchiyama Roshi teaches: “Each individual constructs his own world and lives in the universe he himself has created.” Shunryu Suzuki expresses this same idea when he says in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (p. 34): “Nothing comes from outside your mind.”
Nothing comes from outside your mind. The body-mind speaking now is the manifestation in this moment of causes and conditions distinct to this particular life that are not the causes and conditions that any other body-mind has experienced. There is no other person. I have intimate memories of two people I call my mother and my father. I can see their faces; can you? Can you see the house where I grew up that am seeing right now in my mind? These pictures and memories are unique to me—they are particular to these particular five skandhas that are different from your particular form, feelings, perceptions, internal formations, consciousnesses. My husband was driving us home from the grocery store, and I was looking out the passenger window when we passed a garden on a hill. Eye consciousness produced a memory in mind consciousness: I am in Phyllis’ garden, sitting next to her talking and looking at her flowers. I hear Phyllis’ voice and feel her presence. If you had passed the same spot on Long Ridge Road, you might not even have noticed the garden and you certainly wouldn’t remember Phyllis. That entire moment was my world and the universe created by causes and conditions unique to me.
In How to Cook Your Life and other writings, Uchiyama teaches:
“…we assume that there exists a world which you and I experience in common with all other human beings, that this world existed prior to our births, and that it will continue to exist even after our deaths. …this is nothing more than an idea….Not only that, we wind up thinking that we live and die within this world of fabrication. This is an utterly inverted way of looking at one’s life.”
He expresses the interwoven experience of simultaneously recognizing that I fabricate a world I call real, and at the same time, when I practice emptiness, I recognize that this fabrication has been formed by myriad dharmas. When I experience deeply the no fixed self and impermanence I take to be me, in other words when I practice emptiness, I understand that I am not separate and isolated in a prison of my own unique experience. What I perceive through my personal discriminating consciousnesses also and simultaneously comes to these particular consciousnesses from a vast and unknowable web of interconnection, the entire world that all beings share. This is another way to consider the teaching: There is no other person. The life I experience arises due to all beings with whom I have interacted, every place I have walked through, every encounter I have had with human and non-human animals, with grasses, tiles, walls and pebbles, in Dogen’s words. And when I practice this emptiness I realize that each person is who he is and simultaneously not a fixed self, just as I am who I am and simultaneously not a fixed self.
Each and every being is a unique and special treasure. The beautiful image of Indra’s Net expresses how all these unique and special treasures are connected. A vast net stretches infinitely in all directions. A shining jewel sits at every knot in the net. The jewels are individual beings, human, nonhuman, sentient, insentient, all being in the vast universe. Each jewel reflects every other jewel in the net. Whatever affects one jewel affects all the jewels in the net. Nothing is separate and all phenomena interpenetrates. Each individual thing is its own thing and simultaneously everything is everything else.
From the mind
of a single, long vine,
One hundred opening lives.
Chiyo-ni (1703-1775)
Practicing emptiness is remembering this reality over and over again, dropping the tendency to gauge reality from the limited perspective of duality. Self/other, good/bad, this/that, etc. Practicing emptiness gives rise to wisdom or intuitive knowing which in turn gives rise to compassionate action as we enact the precepts and vows off the cushion, understanding that everything I think, say, or do radiates out into the vast world of all being. We also come to experience that our individual perspective is simultaneously made from the fabric of the collective mind. We human animals mirror each other, so thought forms reflect a collective mind; what are we adding to this collective mind, aka buddha nature, when we speak and act?
In The Heart Sutra we chant: “With nothing to attain the bodhisattva depends on prajna paramita and the mind is no hindrance.” In keeping with this exploration of emptiness in practice, the mind is a hindrance and can bind us when we grasp our views as if they reflect reality rather than recognize that these views are fabrications of the five skandhas. The Heart Sutra continues: “Without any hindrance no fears exist; far apart from every inverted view the bodhisattva dwells in nirvana.” When we recognize that we bind ourselves in tightly held perspectives, we open the hand of thought and let go of the mind that clings to inverted views, dwelling in nirvana. The word nirvana means "extinguishing" or "blowing out,” In the same way we blow out the flame of a candle, practicing emptiness over and over and over again, we extinguish our views, we extinguish the three mental poisons of greed, hate, and delusion and depend on prajna paramita, acting appropriately rather than fighting what is and chasing our desires.
We say that there is no other person and at the same time all beings inter-are. Uchiyama says that: “Ultimately, being born, living, and dying, we are inside this one grand living force. …Every one of us is a part of this life that enfolds the entire universe, the life that constitutes all sentient beings.” We are simultaneously separate entities and completely and entirely intertwined. We are one grand living force.
Uchiyama’s dharma heir Shohaku Okumura expresses this in a clear shorthand. When we cling to our self-centered view, we are the individual karmic self facing what we perceive to be other people and things. He represents this reality with the number 1. Simultaneously the individual-self is a collection of impermanent, constantly shifting elements. He represents this reality with the symbol 0. Because individual-self 1 is empty, not a fixed, permanent entity, 0, we are connected and interpenetrated with all beings and non-beings, that is the entirety of the network of interdependent origination. He represents this with the infinity sign (∞).
So we return to Dogen’s poem that I shared at the beginning of this talk:
The mountain filled with leafless trees
Crisp and clear on this autumn night;
The full moon floating gently above the cluster of roofs,
Having nothing to depend on,
And not clinging to any place;
Free, like the steam rising from a full bowl of rice,
Effortless, as a fish swimming and splashing back and forth,
Like drifting clouds or flowing water.