|
[47] The mind without enmity and intimacy is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it], when among enemies and intimates, we are impartial. 怨みも親しみも無い心は法明門である。それによって怨みや親しみの中に平等が生まれるからである。 This is a pretty straightforward gate statement for once. We immediately think about picking and choosing, chasing after and running away, and all the things that go with discriminative thinking. Intimacy is something that comes up frequently in dharma teachings, and the term used here for “impartial” has some particular context within Japanese Buddhism, so we need to investigate those. Enmity is harboring resentment, holding a grudge or bearing malice. This is ill-will, the desire to do harm to others. Intimacy, on the other hand, in the usual sense is about affection, familiarity and closeness. There’s a feeling of trust that the person or form you’re encountering isn’t a threat to you and doesn’t wish you harm. In the kanji, there’s also a connotation of parental mind. This is a slightly different way of considering likes and dislikes, isn’t it? It’s not just about “I like yellow better than purple” or “I drink tea because I don’t like coffee.” We think of our enemies and intimates as people, but really this gate is talking about anything we encounter. We feel intimate and comfortable with the things we like and suspicious and uncomfortable with things we don’t. However, intimacy in Zen is also about non-separation. Being intimate with things is seeing interconnectedness and the whole story of this moment, not just the parts we like or the aspects we’re predisposed to see. If you’re really intimate with this moment or with an object, you accept it in its entirety. Let’s start with the individual-self version of intimacy and then look at the universal-self version. We all have friends and family with whom we feel intimate. We know things about them and they know things about us. We accept each other warts and all, and we feel like we can be our authentic selves without trying to be somebody else. We say things like “so-and-so is my other half,” or “so-and-so is my soulmate,” or that our children feel like extensions of ourselves. We recognize what we share, and even in those areas where we differ, we appreciate the other person’s interest or skills in that area. It might feel like we’re complementary. I have a dharma sister who is great at tangible detailed activities: packing boxes or suitcases, and navigating without getting lost. I’m hopeless at that stuff. My contribution is making a plan or doing creative problem solving. In that way, we’re complementary even though we’re very different. Diverse elements can function together as a whole without being identical. If I’m carrying the idea that we can’t be friends because our karmic conditions are different, I’m ignoring intimacy. An important part of intimacy is being willing to get go of our preconceptions about what we’re encountering; otherwise those ideas create a barrier. We have to be willing to directly experience whatever it is without the buffer or mediation of our ideas. That can be scary, and that’s why faith and trust are important. I just made the point above that one aspect of intimacy is the trust that this person or object is not a threat or out to cause us harm. When a feeling of mistrust comes up, we can take a moment to discern what actually feels threatened. If the mountain lion is about to spring down from the boulder and land on you, then the threat is clear and we need to run away as fast as possible. If what’s threatened is the ego, it might be possible to see that it isn’t a life and death situation. Maybe defense and retribution aren’t necessary. Maybe defensiveness prevents us from seeing clearly the entirety of the moment and being intimate with what’s really happening. I also mentioned that intimacy has an element of parental mind. This is one of the three minds or sanshin 三心 for which our temple is named: joyful mind or kishin 喜心, nurturing or parental mind or roshin 老心, and magnanimous mind or daishin 大心. Dogen talked about these in the Tenzo Kyokun. Nurturing mind, literally “old mind,” is like the attitude of a kindly grandmother or parent who truly enjoys caring for others. It’s the spirit of the bodhisattva. If you’re focused on caring for someone else, you can’t maintain a barrier between you. You put aside small self and look carefully at the other person. The same thing happens in the way we care for tools or belongings. In the training temple, we’re taught to carry everything with two hands, not to just wave things around casually. If you’re carrying a teapot or pouring with it, if you’re opening a sliding door, use two hands. Partly this is a Japanese cultural expectation -- you give and accept a business card with two hands -- but it’s also a great practice of nurturing mind. You must be intimate with things and with what’s happening. Dogen says when you’re the cook you should handle each grain of rice as if handling your own eyeballs. This is an important manifestation of understanding. Handle everything as it if was you yourself -- because it is! Of course, it’s possible to take care of someone else or your belongings and remain completely inside your own story. You might offer your friend what you yourself would want, or what you have, rather than what that person really needs. You might think about your own self-image (I’m a martyr, I’m a hero, I’m a superior practitioner) but there’s no real intimacy there. The other trap we can fall into is thinking that compassion is an emotion and that only people we like deserve our compassion. We can generate compassion for the family and friends with whom we’re intimate, but not for people we don’t know or don’t like very much. Yet there’s no one outside of our compassion as bodhisattvas because compassion is based on our understanding of interconnectedness. Intimacy is already there even though we put up barriers and choose to ignore it. One of the people we’re most afraid of being intimate with, by the way, is ourselves. It’s difficult to see and accept our own delusion and unskillfulness and to forgive ourselves for our misakes. We need compassion just as much as anyone else. In our zazen we become more intimate with ourselves, both the individual self and the universal self. In Living and Dying in Zazen, Arthur Braverman quotes Sawaki Roshi as saying, "Zazen is basically becoming intimate with the self – the Dharma of becoming you." Sitting without gaining mind or ideas about the five skandhas lets you fully manifest True Self. Then we can become intimate with our ourselves based on our own direct experience rather than having that experience mediated by our thinking. Okumura Roshi would say that’s five skandhas no longer clinging to five skandhas. All this makes intimacy sound like a good, wise and skillful thing, and yet the gate statement says being impartial, without enmity or intimacy, is also a good, wise and skillful thing. Both of these are true, and now we get to consider going beyond intimacy and enmity. If we see and deeply understand the intimacy of the individual self, we can also see the intimacy of the universal self. If we can see through our ideas about intimacy, we can get to true intimacy. It’s another case of using our karma to transcend our karma. There’s a famous story about a 10th century Chinese monk called Fa-yen who got caught in a snowstorm and took refuge with another monk called Lo-han. Lo-han asked Fayen “Where are you going?” Fa-yen eplied, “I am traveling around on pilgrimage.” Lo-han said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?” Fa-yen replied, “I don’t know.” Lo-han said, “Not knowing is most intimate.” If Fa-yen had had an idea about his pilgrimage, he would have missed a lot of things. He might have experienced only those things he was prepared to expect or experience. Just approaching each moment with a spirit of inquiry and accepting it for what it was meant he could be really intimate with it, without the barriers of preconceptions. In the Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Dogen says something similar about intimacy in zazen: In Zen, the Way is attained with both body and mind. If you contemplate Buddhism with the mind alone, you won’t be able to attain the Way in ten thousand kalpas, nor in a thousand lifetimes. You attain the Way when you let go of your thoughts and give up intellectual and conceptual understanding. Those who gained satori by seeing blossoms or hearing sounds achieved it through the body. Therefore, if you cast aside completely the thoughts and concepts of the mind and just do zazen, you attain to an intimacy with the Way. The attainment of the Way is truly accomplished with the body. For this reason, I urge you to just do zazen. Zazen doesn’t require us to use discursive thinking the way we have to in order to negotiate our lives off the cushion. It’s our opportunity to put down the thoughts and concepts of the mind and take down the barriers. Of course, the intimacy with the Way or the universe is there whatever we’re doing, but while sitting in zazen and opening the hand of thought, we might be able to experience it more directly. Real intimacy is not the intimacy of being close with our particular friends and family or our favorite teacup. It’s having the wisdom not to get caught up in deciding where intimacy should exist and where it shouldn’t. Real intimacy is not having any ideas about intimacy. Sawaki Roshi says: In everything, people follow their feelings of joy, anger, sadness and comfort. But that’s something different from everyday mind. Everyday mind means cease-fire. Without preferences, without animosity, without winner and loser, without good and evil, without joy and pain – that’s everyday mind. Without digressing too far, let me just say here that everyday mind here is not our usual human mind of delusion and discursive thinking. Terms like “everyday mind” or “ordinary mind” are pointing to our original direct experience before we start poking our heads in. Sawaki Roshi is talking about the cease-fire of original experience before preferences. Our original mind sees interconnectedness within this one unified reality and that there’s nothing outside of it, and this is how we go beyond intimacy and enmity and get to impartiality. The Japanese word here is byodo 平等. When we add the word onshin 怨親 we have the phrase onshin byodo 怨親平等. It means that the enemy and the ally are equal, or that we treat hate and love alike, and it’s important in Japanese Buddhist culture. For instance, in Japan there are stone monuments and memorial services for people who died on both sides of a battle. The point is that the living need to transcend hatred to help the dead be reborn in Amida’s pure land, where everyone is treated equally and impartially. When two samurai fought a duel and one died, the other would bow to the corpse and pray for him. After a battle, warlords prayed not only for their own fallen soldiers but also for those of the enemy commander. During the conflict, people had to fight each other, but afterward they took the larger view that intimates and enemies are equally important. They are all loved by others, and their lives are unique and individual. Friends and enemies are all living one interconnected life. The practice was to let go of picking and choosing based on personal emotion, and care for everyone. Imagine if that was what was happening in our country right now! What a difficult, painful and important practice to see the”other side” as human beings who are doing their best to live and take care of the people they care about, and to do that sincerely, not just with nice words about healing and cooperation but actually committing to skillful action. We’ll help you bury your dead and pray for their safe passage. While we certainly have to recognize individuality and the particulars of various circumstances, or sabetsu 差別, we also have to recognize byodo, or impartiality or equality. Sabetsu and byodo are two sides of one whole universe. As I’ve mentioned at previous gates, Okumura Roshi uses the image of five fingers and one hand to illustrate seeing both difference and sameness. Seeing how everything is different and independent on the one side and equal and interconnected on the other side is the basic view of Mahayana. He says: Buddha’s awakening is the way to see things equally, without any discrimination. The Buddha’s wisdom is called Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom. The mirror reflects everything as it is, without any distortion. Another name of Buddha’s wisdom is byodo shochi, Wisdom Which Sees the Nature of Equality. This is interesting: the mirror reflects everything as it is, without distortion. Both sabetsu / distinction, and byodo / equality, are already there. Distortion is seeing and acting on only one or the other. There’s a contest, and then there’s cleaning up the mess. If in the heat of the moment we can’t see any other kind of byodo, we can at least acknowledge the first noble truth: all of us who have this human form have delusion and suffering. We have that as common ground if nothing else. My suffering is not identical to your suffering because our karmic circumstances are different, but nobody is free from suffering, no matter what kind of front we put up. Rather than coming together to help each other with our suffering, to bury all of our dead and pray for all of their safe passages, we can create separation based on whether my suffering is more important, more righteous or deeper than yours. Following elections, it’s not uncommon to take a step back and try to understand why voters supported each of the candidates. People on all sides may cast their votes in favor of the least objectionable candidate: “I don’t like my guy, but the other guy is worse and less likely to ease my suffering.” It can be easy to forget that we all experience suffering. For some, that suffering is tied to a feeling of being ill-treated. For others, it’s anxiety about their ability to provide for their families. Still others are concerned about the effects of war, environmental unsustainability or public health. None of these kinds of suffering is new, but depending on what kinds of communications we pay attention to, it’s possible to be completely unaware of suffering that’s different from our own. We can set to arguing about what kind of suffering is most urgent and whose problems get solved first or at all. In the midst of these competing forms of suffering, how do we decide which direction to take? Sawaki Roshi says: Everyone should sit firmly anchored in the place where there is no better and worse. Your whole life you’re completely out of your mind because you think it’s obvious that there is a “you” and “the others.” You put on an act to stand out in a crowd, but in reality there’s neither “you” nor “the others.” Buddhadharma means seamlessness. What seam runs between you and me? Sooner or later we all end up acting as if a seam separates friend and foe. When we get too used to this, we believe that this seam really exists. Poor and rich, important and unimportant—none of that exists. It’s only glitter on the waves. [Sawaki to you] At this point it would be easy to say yeah, yeah, here we go again with "Can’t we all just get along and be nice to each other?" Messages about peace and harmony can get kind of trite. If only it were that easy! This gate challenges us to go beyond the surface niceness and look carefully at what intimacy is and what enemies are, and what it means to be really impartial and see with the eyes of Buddha. It’s not enough just to say nice things. We have to start with “I.” We’ve got to commit to doing the work of asking, Where am I stuck? What am I not seeing? How can I come to understand the other side’s point of view? What very common human circumstance might be giving rise to this person’s point of view? How can I see the seam and also the seamlessness? In what ways am I assuming seam is there, and why do I think so? Can I see clearly my allies and the people who oppose me and also see them equally? It’s important to remember that seeing with impartiality doesn’t mean being condescending. I forgive you your massive delusion because I can see that you’re caught up in the three poisons, and the reason I can see that and you can’t is that I’m more enlightened than you. This is not impartiality. It’s just another ego trip. Our friends and enemies aren’t identical, and we don’t have to pretend they are. We just have to be able to see that in addition to being across the seam from each other, there is also no seam. If we see clearly, we can at least have respect for the other side, not as admiration but as honoring someone’s feelings, traditions or point of view. After all, the roots of “respect” are “to look back.” It’s all about the seeing. Questions for reflection and discussion:
Comments are closed.
|
About the text The Ippyakuhachi Homyomon, or 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination, appears as the 11th fascicle of the 12 fascicle version of Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo. Dogen didn't compile the list himself; it's mostly a long quote from another text called the Sutra of Collected Past Deeds of the Buddha. Dogen wrote a final paragraph recommending that we investigate these gates thoroughly. Hoko has been talking about the gates one by one since 2016. She provides material here that can be used by weekly dharma discussion groups as well as for individual study. The 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination
[1] Right belief [2] Pure mind [3] Delight [4] Love and cheerfulness The three forms of behavior [5] Right conduct of the actions of the body [6] Pure conduct of the actions of the mouth [7] Pure conduct of the actions of the mind The six kinds of mindfulness [8] Mindfulness of Buddha [9] Mindfulness of Dharma [10] Mindfulness of Sangha [11] Mindfulness of generosity [12] Mindfulness of precepts [13] Mindfulness of the heavens The four Brahmaviharas [14] Benevolence [15] Compassion [16] Joy [17] Abandonment The four dharma seals [18] Reflection on inconstancy [19] Reflection on suffering [20] Reflection on there being no self [21] Reflection on stillness [22] Repentance [23] Humility [24] Veracity [25] Truth [26] Dharma conduct [27] The Three Devotions [28] Recognition of kindness [29] Repayment of kindness [30] No self-deception [31] To work for living beings [32] To work for the Dharma [33] Awareness of time [34] Inhibition of self-conceit [35] The nonarising of ill-will [36] Being without hindrances [37] Belief and understanding [38] Reflection on impurity [39] Not to quarrel [40] Not being foolish [41] Enjoyment of the meaning of the Dharma [42] Love of Dharma illumination [43] Pursuit of abundant knowledge [44] Right means [45] Knowledge of names and forms [46] The view to expiate causes [47] The mind without enmity and intimacy [48] Hidden expedient means [49] Equality of all elements [50] The sense organs [51] Realization of nonappearance The elements of bodhi: The four abodes of mindfulness [52] The body as an abode of mindfulness [53] Feeling as an abode of mindfulness [54] Mind as an abode of mindfulness [55] The Dharma as an abode of mindfulness [56] The four right exertions [57] The four bases of mystical power The five faculties [58] The faculty of belief [59] The faculty of effort [60] The faculty of mindfulness [61] The faculty of balance [62] The faculty of wisdom The five powers [63] The power of belief [64] The power of effort [65] The power of mindfulness [66] The power of balance [67] The power of wisdom [68] Mindfulness, as a part of the state of truth [69] Examination of Dharma, as a part of the state of truth [70] Effort, as a part of the state of truth [71] Enjoyment, as a part of the state of truth [72] Entrustment as a part of the state of truth [73] The balanced state, as a part of the state of truth [74] Abandonment, as a part of the state of truth The Eightfold Path [75] Right view [76] Right discrimination [77] Right speech [78] Right action [79] Right livelihood [80] Right practice [81] Right mindfulness [82] Right balanced state [83] The bodhi-mind [84] Reliance [85] Right belief [86] Development The six paramitas [87] The dāna pāramitā [88] The precepts pāramitā [89] The forbearance pāramitā. [90] The diligence pāramitā [91] The dhyāna pāramitā [92] The wisdom pāramitā [93] Expedient means [94] The four elements of sociability [95] To teach and guide living beings [96] Acceptance of the right Dharma [97] Accretion of happiness [98] The practice of the balanced state of dhyāna [99] Stillness [100] The wisdom view [101] Entry into the state of unrestricted speech [102] Entry into all conduct [103] Accomplishment of the state of dhāraṇī [104] Attainment of the state of unrestricted speech [105] Endurance of obedient following [106] Attainment of realization of the Dharma of nonappearance [107] The state beyond regressing and straying [108] The wisdom that leads us from one state to another state and, somehow, one more: [109] The state in which water is sprinkled on the head Archives
December 2024
|
RSS Feed