|
[52] The body as an abode of mindfulness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] all dharmas are serene. 受念處是法明門、斷一切受故。 This time we begin a four-part look at satipatthana, or the four foundations or arousings of mindfulness. Each of the next four gates takes up an aspect: body, feeling, mind and dharma. The Mahasatipatthana Sutra is a main source text for mindfulness practice in the early Buddhist tradition. It’s about methodically cultivating the ability to pay continuous attention to our experience of whatever is happening in this moment. It’s the continuous observation that’s important, because whatever we’re paying attention to is constantly changing; steady attention in the midst of change makes the mind concentrated and stable, and also observing qualities and characteristics whatever it is enables some insight and understanding Mindfulness is seeing all dharmas as they are with their true nature, before we have personal reactions and start writing stories. This is seeing without making the distinctions that are driven by delusion, clinging and the three poisons, but it’s more than just observing external dharmas. It’s also paying attention to what we’re doing and how we’re doing it: remembering to practice, remembering the teachings. Am I being skillful or not? Am I making right effort? Am I staying on the path? Am I getting distracted by craving and aversion? It supports the ongoing discernment and inquiry that we do in our moment-by-moment practice. Mindfulness is important for seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action. We need to settle into that place where all dharmas are serene, where we’re not pulled around by the distractions of the body, and we also need to use this body to actively work to liberate beings from suffering. There is both quiet and activity. It’s easy for us to sort of ignore the body unless it’s giving us trouble. We stand, sit, walk and lie down without paying much attention to how that happens. Kodo Sawaki said: When we’re not sick, we forget our bodies. When my legs were strong, I walked and ran, forgetting my feet. Lately, because my legs are getting sick and weak, I begin to appreciate that they’re really great things. When we’re healthy, we forget our health and just work. When we think of a certain thing, there’s usually something wrong with it. When our mind and its objects do not arise, there’s nothing special. (1) Uchiyama said the same thing in his commentary on the Bendowa: It is good for your stomach when you forget the existence of the stomach and let it function well. Also, suppose that you have a small injury on the tip of your little finger. The finger you usually forget will suddenly become a big problem. The best condition for all parts of the body is that you forget the existence of the body and let each part function in accordance with necessity in each situation. This is called nonaction. Just the ordinary reality of life that has nothing special is best. (2) Here we have a paradox. Mindfulness of the body has always been an important dharma gate in the Buddhist tradition, and yet Sawaki Roshi and Uchiyama Roshi are telling us that it’s best to forget the body. Some early Buddhist practice emphasized analysis of things as way to understand that they are impermanent or unsubstantial. Only conditioned things like the body can be intellectually analyzed. We can have ideas about conditioned things and describe them, but we can’t do any of that with emptiness or awakening or pure mind; we can’t understand them that way. We can analyze the parts of the body, the sensory inputs that come in through the sense gates, and we can look carefully at the relationships between these elements in order to try to understand the body and ourselves. However, the elements and relationships change and we can see that the body is not a fixed and permanent self, and we can’t analyze our way to understanding emptiness. For that, we need direct experience. For early Buddhists, when it comes to mindfulness with the body, the practice was to pay attention to the breath—not to change it, but to simply be aware of it: when breathing in or out with a short or long breath, to be aware that one was breathing in or out with a short or long breath. Then you were to be aware of the experience of the body when breathing in or out and short or long, and then to calm the body while breathing. You become aware of things that arise and dissolve in the body, and finally you contemplate how the body exists and give up clinging to anything. Then you do the same thing when sitting, standing, walking or lying down (the four postures of the body), knowing when you’re doing these things, seeing how the body arises and dissolves, and ceasing clinging. Next you move on to all daily activities: eating, wearing robes, using the toilet, moving around, paying attention to those and the impermanence of the body. Contemplating the impurity of the body in order to destroy the delusion of beauty, you envision the body as bag of skin containing a collection of bones, muscles, sinews and organs, or imagine all the various fluids created by the body. Finally you imagine the body as a corpse and all the various ways it decays or is eaten by animals and the bones scattered around. All this is to break the enchantment with the body. In the early teachings, practicing mindfulness in the body led to achieving each of the four dhyanas in Sanskrit or jhanas in Pali. These are four stages toward understanding the true nature of reality and reaching Nirvana. They mark a shift away from outward world of the senses. The first is detachment from the external world and becoming aware of joy and ease that pervade the body. The second is concentration that lets go of intellectual investigation. The third is that joy dissolves, and only the sense of ease remains. The fourth is that ease also dissolves and leaves only equanimity. Then there are further spiritual exercises having to do with contemplating infinity and the unreality of things, and then even letting go of that. Buddha said that developing mindfulness in the body was a sort of first line of defense against Mara, or delusion, because it resulted in skillfulness that comes from clear knowing. He gives a lot of examples that compare someone without mindfulness in the body to something that can’t withstand invasion. If you throw a heavy rock into a pile of wet clay it gets in easily, while a ball of lightweight string thrown at a hard wooden door just bounces off. If you pour water into an empty water pot it goes in easily, while if the pot is already full the additional water just spills over. If all that isn’t enough, the Buddha said there are ten benefits to practicing mindfulness in the body [1] going beyond displeasure and delight [2] going beyond fear and dread [3] enduring unpleasant bodily feelings: cold, hunger, bug bites, hurtful language, various physical pains [4] attaining at will the four jhanas or heightened mental states [5] having supranormal powers like appearing and disappearing, walking through walls, flying through the air [6] hearing both human and divine sounds whether far or near [7] being able to read minds and knowing when someone is experiencing craving / aversion, delusion / awareness, distraction / concentration [8] remembering his previous lives and circumstances of that [9] seeing people’s karma and the conditions of their rebirth; why they were born in various circumstances [10] existing in pure awareness This isn’t an approach to practice that we particularly take up at Sanshin. In fact, Dogen had some fairly harsh words for those who try to regulate themselves with these practices. However, he is completely in favor of knowing that a long breath is long and short breath is short. Of course, being Dogen, it’s not as simple as that. He also says that his teacher Tendo Nyojo taught that whether the breath is long or short, it doesn’t come from anywhere or go to anywhere, so there’s actually no distinction between long or short. Anyway, our practice is not about withdrawing from the world but about seeing how samsara and Nirvana are not separate and learning how to be completely engaged in what’s happening without losing sight of the true nature of reality. Yet we can certainly identify with becoming aware of physical sensation and seeing how we write the self-involved story line. We can pay attention to how our own body is impermanent and interconnected and see how that also applies to everything else we encounter. We’re intimate with the body as the ground of our practice, and that makes it a great dharma gate for investigating the truth of Buddha’s teachings. Uchiyama Roshi says: This self is not some fixed body, it’s constantly changing. Every time we take a breath we’re changing. Our consciousness is always changing, too. All the chemical and physical processes in our body are also constantly changing. And yet, everything temporarily takes a form. This is our true self. By paying attention to the body, we get to see firsthand how we live in the middle of both form and emptiness. This body is real, and it’s also true that it’s just a collection of five skandhas that comes together for awhile and then dissolves. If the body is not separate from the rest of the Buddha way, then it’s a really important part of our practice. Also, of course, we have to pay attention to what the body is doing because it’s one of the three places where we create karma. In Opening the Hand of Thought, Uchiyama Roshi makes the point that even though awakening is already here, we often live blindly. We get caught up in thoughts and think they’re the only reality. Our job as practitioners is to determine how to live in the midst of it all in a wholesome way. He says: The important thing is to find a sane way to live out the reality of life. This is what a true spiritual practice is about: not spirit or mind separated from the body and the world, but a true way of life. This is what zazen is—a practice of living out the fresh reality of life. (3) We can see in our zazen that we take the posture and appear to be sitting completely still, but at the same time we’re breathing and blood is flowing. We’re making micro-adjustments to the posture all the time just to stay upright. There is form and emptiness, and there is stillness and activity. We get to be personally aware of all of that and have that direct experience. If we fast-forward from the early teachings in India to 13th century Japan, we see that the four foundations of mindfulness were important to Dogen. He wrote about them in several places, and we can look at two discourses here from the Eihei Koroku. First, number 284: Although people in the past who left the world to become teachers said that the body and mind of ancient buddhas become attached to grasses and trees, they never said that [mindfulness of] body, sensations, mind and phenomena are the eyeballs of the ancestral teachers. (4) According to Dogen, early teachers said that ancient buddhas manifested concretely in the world just as grasses and trees do. However, they never said that the four foundations of mindfulness are the very stuff of these buddhas, or that mindfulness of these four things is itself Buddha or awakening. That’s a shift from doing body-based mindfulness practices in order to gradually achieve the goal of not clinging to the body and eventually to stop clinging to anything in the world. Dogen says again here that practice and awareness are not separate from awakening. We aren’t practicing in order to get a reward later. Being mindful of the body from within the body is itself awakening or Buddha. Uchuyama Roshi frequently talked about the life force, which is the complete functioning of reality in this moment, and how we need to live out this true reality from within this body and mind. That means that we recognize that there’s something more to our lives than being individuals within individual bodies. He says: The force that makes my heartbeat sends blood flowing through my whole body and allows me to breathe so many times per minute. It is not something that I control or activate. The power that performs these functions works completely beyond my thoughts, Can we say this power is not me because it comes from beyond my thinking mind? It is neither a “higher power” nor some “other power,” nor is it my personal “self-power.” It is the energy of life. The other Dogen discourse we can look at for this is number 310: Our Buddha (Shakyamuni) said to his disciples, there are four foundations of mindfulness on which people should depend. These four foundations of mindfulness refer to contemplating the body as impure, contemplating sensation as suffering, contemplating mind as impermanent and contemplating phenomena as non-substantial. I, Eihei, also have four foundations of mindfulness: contemplating the body as a skin-bag, contemplating sensation as eating bowls, contemplating mind as fences, walls, tiles and pebbles, and contemplating phenomena as old man Zhang drinking wine, old man Li getting drunk. Great assembly, are my four foundations of mindfulness the same or different from the ancient Buddha’s four foundations of mindfulness? If you say they are the same, your eyebrows will fall out (from lying). If you say they are the same, you will lose your body and life. (5) Because he’s talking about all four foundations, we’ll come back to this when we talk about each of the other three. For now, let’s look at Buddha’s contemplating the body as impure and Dogen’s contemplating the body as a skin bag. The pattern for each of these is that Dogen takes the Buddha’s conclusion about whatever it is and replaces it with a concrete example of emptiness, if you will. Buddha says the body is impure so that practitioners will work on letting go of attachment to it. It’s full of nasty, smelly stuff, it gets sick and dies, and the physical sensations that arise from it set off the entire 12-fold chain. Clinging to the body is a real hindrance to achieving Nirvana. Dogen, however, says the body is simply a collection of bones and organs contained within our skin. We don’t have to mortify it or ignore what’s happening with it in order to achieve a goal. In fact, as we saw at Gate 50, he considered the sense organs and what arises from them to be instances of prajna. The body is simply the body. Yes, clinging to it is not helpful, but it is not in itself impure; it’s part of this one unified reality, not outside of Buddha’s way, so rather than thinking, “Ugh! Skin bag! Not pretty. Corpses are unpleasant. Yuck!” Dogen says the body is just as it is, beyond what we think about it. When we see it through the eyes of Buddha, we don’t need to get stuck in ideas of purity and defilement. We can just pay attention to what the body is doing and what we’re doing with the body and see impermanence and interconnection. Recognizing the body as the ground of our practice is really important. This gate statement says that mindfulness of the body allows us to settle down in equanimity because all dharmas are serene. When we encounter or experience things, we recognize that information is coming in through the sense gates; we’re forming opinions and judgements about those sensations, and taking actions and creating karma based on that. When we see clearly what’s happening with the body, we can keep from being swept away and caught up in hindrances, and that includes both attachment to the body and hatred for the body. Body image is a big part of our identity, but it’s difficult to see the body as it is. Things would be better if only I was thinner or better looking or my back didn’t hurt. Or maybe, I’m good looking or healthy, so I’m better than others and need to go all out to protect my looks and health or else I’m no good. There’s lots of craving and aversion associated with the body, but when we have a clear view of the body we can better use it to take skillful action. Dogen said to those serving as tenzo: Rejoice in your birth into the world, where you are capable of using your body freely to offer food to the three treasures. We pay attention to the body not to withdraw from the world but to be bodhisattvas in the world. In order to do that, we need to see everything as ourselves. In other words, we need to see that our bodies are not separate from anything and they function together with the entire universe. Uchiyama Roshi says that when we really get that mind and object are one, everything we encounter in our lives functions as a part of our bodies. So where does the body begin and end? Mindfulness of the body means mindfulness of all dharmas. Seeing and carrying out all of our activities as though everything was a part of our bodies is a description of samadhi. If we can see this way, then all actions of our bodies are practice, and everything we do is both an offering and a chance to study a dharma gate. In the training temple there are gathas or short verses for many of the daily activities of life, verses for using toilet, shaving head, brushing the teeth, etc. The form is to name the activity, say “I vow with all beings,” then name some relevant aspiration. Washing the face, I vow with all beings to attain the pure dharma gate and be forever undefiled. Brushing the teeth in the morning, I vow with all beings, to care for the eyeteeth that bite through all afflictions. These are helpful reminders to pay attention to what we’re doing with the body, to see those activities as practice and as offerings. Doing formal meals using oryoki is another good example, but really all of our forms are about behaving with dignity and decorum, maintaining awareness of what we’re doing and the effect of that on others. It’s how we maintain harmony in the sangha. Dogen wrote a book on forms and regulations in the training temple because these things are important dharma gates. Being in a training temple is about paying attention with body and mind and practicing through the daily tasks of living. It’s about not getting lost in thoughts and forgetting the real stuff of our lives. Of course, we can do that wherever we are. There’s always an opportunity to practice serenity and equanimity through paying attention to the body. It’s a chance not only to have a personal experience of settling down in this moment, but also to bring peace to others by being aware of what’s coming in through the body and of the action of our bodies in the world. Notes (1) Uchiyama Roshi, K. (2014). Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo. United States: Wisdom Publications, p.165. (2) The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. (2011). United States: Tuttle Publishing, p.191. (3) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 39. (4) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications. p. 270. (5) Dogen's Extensive Record, p 287. 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
January 2025
|
RSS Feed