First a bit a backtracking.  The problem with studying, learning, and  writing is the time for consolidation isn’t always available.  After Rohatsu in December, I committed to taking on the various commentaries on the Heart Sutra and have been delighted by some I didn’t know about.  Coincidentally (or not), a copy of Red Pine’s translation arrived from Counterpoint Press and that just sealed the deal to dive into the sutra.  (I have Ken McLeod’s contribution on the shelf but may not get to it until later this year!)

Second, a bit of history.  The first book on the Prajnaparamita I tackled was Lex Hixon’s Mother of All Buddhas.  The outcome was the same as I would have had as a fair-to-middling Elementary School student trying to read about Quantum Physics.  Then came Thich Nhat Hanh’s work, The Heart of Understanding from which I extracted the magical nature of the mantra: gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, bodhi svaha.  That seemed to suffice with regular chanting of his translation of the sutra and admonishment to simply let it seep into my bones.  Unfortunately (or not), I’m not much given to blind belief and kept returning to and becoming discouraged by Hixon’s tome.

Over time, I think I fell into the common experience that the Heart Sutra is one part faith healing, one part penetrable only by advanced scholars, one part confounding of terms and language, one part apostolic creed, one part…  You get the idea.  It seemed to be the elephant many blind wise persons were trying to describe to equally blind audiences.

Before you buy my version of the elephant, do listen to Kaz Tanahashi’s commentary on the Prajnaparamita.  The recordings are from Rohatsu at Upaya Zen Center and are in the first 20 minutes of each dharma talk.  Listen to rest of the talks too but Kaz’s description of the origins and the intent of the sutra are invaluable to clarifying this tangle that arose out of scriptural, doctrinal, and cultural contacts.

Now to Red Pine.  This translation and commentary is painstakingly written and expresses the tangled history with luminous clarity.  You can read various tidbits from it in the previous posts of this week.   However, what really stands out for me is the way Red Pine puts into perspective the historical backdrop and the doctrinal intent of the sutra – with a dollop of rollicking Buddhist mythology.  As he walks through the sutra, we learn about the intentional way it is set up to deconstruct (as a deconstruction itself!) the teachings of the ancients which lay stuck in objectifying experience.  He takes us through to the meaning of being a bodhisattva and the challenges.  That was worth the price of admission.  And finally, there is a lovely flourish that draws the circle of going inwards into practice so we can emerge from the womb of the Prajnaparamita as buddhas (hence the sutra’s epithet, Mother of All Buddhas).

Back to the teaser: what are the five fears of the beginning bodhisattva?

We fear survival – what if I give all and that generosity depletes me?

We fear criticism – what if we are censured, undermined by the dis-ingenuousness of others?

We fear death – what if we back away from that ultimate sacrifice, of giving up our life for another, for all others?

We fear a bad existence – what if the teachings are not available just as we come into being and need them to guide us?

We fear speaking before others – what if we fail in relaying the urgency of practice if we are all to realize being buddhas?

This is the holding back in the early stages of bodhisattva-hood.  When we cannot extend our practice beyond these fears, it gives birth to a refusal time and again to engage in this very life that is our own.

And we already know the punch line.  None of these exist in and of themselves, being constructed of a “constant flux” of sensory flow.  That much is the typical patter of reciting the Prajnaparamita but what I really liked in Red Pine’s commentary was what should have been obvious about seeking the reality of the self.

We don’t tend to look for our sense of abiding self in the ear.  Or the eye.  Or nose, tongue, or body.  (Well, for those of us with body image issues perhaps we do see our enduring self inappropriately in the body!  Perhaps vanity and fears were localized differently in the Buddha’s time.)  We tend to seek our Self in the mind and the effluent of mind, thoughts.  Now, we can easily accept the insanity of saying my Self is defined by my nose and its function and yet we cannot discard the assertion of the mind that it irrevocably defines us.

Go figure.

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(1)  The Heart Sutra translation and commentary by Red Pine (Counterpoint Press)

Try telling an orally fixated kitten that you too like to lick your bowl clean.  It’s a Zen thing, I explained.  Clean your bowl!  As you can see, he’s not impressed.  I’m fascinated by Sprout’s practice of defending himself.  My lacerations will heal soon and the sting does little to deter me from testing out what actually triggers his grab-and-slash reflexes.  So far I’ve sorted out that it has little to do with territory (but he has yet to meet the other two cats) or food (ample and free-range).  It does have much to do with that vulnerable underbelly.

Form.  The first of the Five Skandhas and the one that stands as the exemplar of the boundlessness, the unknowability of the other four.  Red Pine in his commentary (1) says that it represents our obsession with the material.  It is “our first line of defense in contesting attacks on the validity of our existence…” and we need to believe it exists.  We try to define ourselves in terms of the structure, shape, and extension into space and time of our body.  Oh and, how we fail.

Red Pine goes on to say we disregard the other four skandhas at our own peril.  We risk entrenching form as the only path to understanding emptiness and forget the intricate role all five play with each other.  One of the things that always fascinated me about this section of the Heart Sutra is the dropping out of “sensation, perception, memory, and consciousness” from the recitation.  It worries me that we don’t chant them with the same thundering detail as we do with form.  It elevates form as something to truly be wary of and without attention, our stance to the other four becomes one of benign neglect.  And, truth be told, becoming caught in believing the solidity of sensations, perceptions, memory, and consciousness is more cause for worry than form by itself.

Let me put it this way: when the body fails us, we may have a sense of assault on our image, identity, potential, and so on.  However the power of the delusion that we are identified by our form lies not in the body but in what we sense in it (pain!), perceive of it (Oh this is never going to end!), memories we have of it (the last time I was laid up forever!), and consciousness of the experience with it (why me!?).

So repeat regularly:

Feelings are the same as boundlessness; boundlessness is the same as feelings
Perceptions are the same as boundlessness; boundlessness is the same as perceptions
Mental formations are the same  as boundlessness; boundlessness is the same as mental formations
Discernment is the same as boundlessness; boundlessness is the same as discernment. (2)

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(1) Heart Sutra, translation and commentary by Red Pine
(2) Skandha terms from Heart Sutra version translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi & Joan Halifax Roshi © 2003 

If you want to meet terrifying silence, tell the world you are going full time as a poet.  Who would give me a word of encouragement if I did?  It has never been easy to go full-time as a poet in any recorded portion of human history.  When we announce to the world that we are about to go full-time as a poet, people do not come up to us, slapping us on the back, saying, “Great career move, David,” or “I hear they are taking them on at Lockheed right now,” or “Marvelous.  I hear there’s a decent dental plan comes with the verse.” (p. 123)

I remember telling my parents I had left my job as a Chemist in the Federal Government to become a free-lance writer.  After the ear-piercing silence, they shook their heads, mystified that I would walk away from a good pension plan (health care!) for a life of… of … of what? my father demanded.  Even worse was my defensive attempt to explain that Frank had a good job as a self-employed consultant.  They could not grasp the link between how he “did” his job and how the money came in; there wasn’t a bi-weekly pay cheque.  This was crucial.  That flow from production to recompense was what made their world feel safe and secure.  Of course, their perplex mystified me equally because they had both endured losses of their treasured careers through the capriciousness of political upheavals.

I amuse myself these days having conversations with the (likely aggravated) spirit of my dear Dad.

“Well, Dad, I’ve decided to close my private practice to become a Chaplain,” I announce to his portrait on the ancestor’s altar.

“A Chaplain?  Does that have a better salary than a psychologist?”  His right eyebrow would begin a syncopating twitch. It makes the little mole on his eyelid a bouncing ball I follow to sing along with the “career catastrophe” song.

“Um.  Well.  No.  I don’t know.  I mean, I don’t know if Chaplains get paid.  Not in private practice anyway.  In hospitals, they get about $32 an hour.”

“And what do you get paid now?”  I can feel the rabbit hole opening up because he’s never understood how self-employed professionals pay themselves.  ”Draw?” he would ask.  ”That’s what you do with crayons!  How much is your cheque made out for each week!”

“Well, it doesn’t matter what I get now, Dad.  I’d be following my heart – you know, doing what’s important to me… for the world… to ..er..um… save all beings… creations… numberless… vow…”  I’m floundering and the other ancestors on the altar are now looking very interested in how this is going to end.

He seems to be silent long enough for a few ashes to topple from the incense stick.  ”Saving all beings, eh?”  He glances over at his mother who in her portrait is about to walk over to him and plead my case.  ”Like a Bodhisattva.  Well, make sure you read the contract carefully before you sign it.”

I’ve never really considered that Bodhisattva-hood is a career choice.  It seems to just arise for most people I know whom I think of as compassionate beings committed to easing suffering in the world.  Perhaps they just make it all look simple.  Or perhaps it is really just that simple; choose the path.

The Heart Sutra is emphatic that seeing through the illusion of separateness and an abiding self is the step to being unhindered to be of service to the world.  Grounded in this understanding that separation and interconnection are the figure and ground of our life, we break free of the things that hinder us, that hold us back from being who we are, which cloud our vision, our dreams, our intimate truth.   “Without hindrance, the mind has no fear.”  Anger, desire, sloth (my favourite), restlessness/rumination, and doubt cannot shake or stir us from our career choice – poet, writer, Chaplain, Bodhisattvas all.   Without these blockades in our path, we enter fully into that pilgrimage of discovering who we already are.

Over the next few months, I took the time (to speak) with person after person (in the organization)….  I began to see that in an extraordinary way the conversations themselves were doing all the work.  It forced me to ask the next question: “If this kind of conversation will bring you the work you want for yourself within an organization, what kind of work do you really want to do in the wider world?  What are your elemental waters?  What courageous conversations will bring you to your poetry?”  Each of us has an equivalent core in our work, whether it is the path of the artist or the explorations of the engineer.  Even if we already possess the work of our dreams, there is a way of doing that work that will deepen and enliven it, a way that begs for a daily disciplined conversation. (p.135)

Thank you for the daily disciplined (if somewhat raucous) conversation.

That’s Avalokita giving the Great Sage a knock on the head, a poke in the ribs.  Wake up!  Shariputra was renowned for his ability to think through the Buddha’s teachings – a fact that supposedly delayed his ascendency to arhantship by a week behind his pal Maudgalyayana.    But what Avaloikta is saying here to this very well-achieved and learned disciple of the Buddha is “Don’t stop at knowing the five streams of body and mind, the Three Poisons, the 12 stages of Dependent Origination, the Four Noble Truths!”  We can dive deeper than the dis-illusion of self into the five streams of body and mind.  It’s much more than annihilating the self, deconstructing I-me-mine.

When my brother was in the seminary, he used to give me Bibles for presents.  I have a nice collection that, although I shake my head at his inability to understand the twelve year old I was, I do treasure.  ”There’s Good News in this!” he would proclaim, thrusting the massive volumes at me.  I suppose if I had worked as hard at the Bible as Shariputra had at the five skandhas, Three Poisons, 12 Stages of Dependent Origination, and the Four Noble Truths, I might have found the Good News.

Form is the same as boundless; boundlessness is the same as form works for me as Good News.  It means practice is not about getting rid of something or becoming perfect at anything.  In fact, translating the Heart Sutra as the “Perfection of Wisdom” appears to set the bar rather high.  It seems to say, Grasp the non-existence of a fixed self and non-duality and you’ve got it made.  Well, that’s not what is meant by “Perfection” nor is it likely to happen in my world where I tend to trip on solid objects and step on people’s soft emotional centers like a sociopathic bull.

I’m reminded again and again by Kaz Tanahashi Sensei’s words: The enso is not perfect but it is complete.  Complete because it contains the perfect and the imperfect nondiscriminately.  Form and boundlessness are not discriminable; together they are complete.

The more I sit with this, the simpler it becomes:

Iha Shariputra!  Iha Genju!

Or if you’re into the Japanese version: Sha Ri Shi!  Genju!

You there!

Wake up and stretch beyond the lists that limit you from completion.

Everyone’s got one these days.  Bucket lists, I mean.  My friends no longer talk about dreams or dreams-of-a-lifetime; they talk in terms of bucket lists.  I have nothing against lists.  In fact, I am an inveterate list maker.   I have lists of kanji characters I intend to practice; they are lovingly copied and cross-referenced with the indecipherable dictionary of kanji  variations that is also on my list to learn how to read.  I have a list of books I intend to read; these are written by Nobel prize winners in Literature.  I have a list of ways to remember what Frank says so that next Christmas I don’t forget and I complain to Frank that he never tells me what he likes.

Bucket lists however make my skin creep up one side of my body and down the other.  They feel riven with the need to prove we’ve lived life to the fullest.  It’s as if at my funeral you will all be checking my list and deciding whether to say, “Well, she had a good life, didn’t she!”  I can spare you the dilemma and even the cost of flying across the country to make any such pronouncements.

Anything I do with my life is going to be the result of a confluence of an innumerable number of things, most of which I will have had little control over.  So should I win the Nobel Prize, it’s not me doing it.  Should I summit a mountain somewhere or cross a burning desert, it’s not me.  Should I meet you in a coffee shop and have a deep, heart-felt exchange of spirit of love, it’s (definitely) not me.

So who is it?  Who is it then, who crosses burning landscapes, shivers with delight at the peak of success, collapses in a heap when things just fall apart?

In the Heart Sutra, Avalokita sees through the bucket list.  He sees that “all five streams of body and mind are boundless.”  While I love the feel of boundlessness, don’t go dropping me into a place without guardrails too quickly; I may turn tail and make off to a place on my own bucket list.  The version I like says Avalokita “gave rise to the five skandhas.”  It feels nice to think that someone as accomplished as Avalokita would be contemplating the nature of reality and the five ways we interface with the world pop up for him too.  (Form, feelings, perception, mental formations, and discernment (consciousness in some versions) co-create what I see as “I-me-mine.”)

The difference, of course, between a Bodhisattva like Avalokita and me, is that he isn’t bothered by the five streams or his mind.  That’s the whole point of this verse; he sees them for what they are.  He brings them into focus, gives rise to them so that they can be smack in the cross-hairs of his investigation.  Me, I turn into a Venus fly trap for all the ways the five heaps can become a drama.  Objects don’t meet my needs, itchy noses and runny eyes are clearly unpleasant and harbingers of doom, everyone has it easier than I do, or no one appreciates that I’m “special.”  That’s only four.  When it comes to dealing with the heap of my mind… well, that says it all, doesn’t it?

But maybe that’s just what my practice is for the moment.  These five heaps are plunked around me and they remind me of the true nature of “I-me-mine.”  So every time someone pulls out a bucket list, I notice the five streams of body and mind burbling to me about digging deeper than defining myself by what I’ve done or not done or going to do or not do.

After the heroics of trying to suppress my coughing fits over two weeks, I began to see flashes of white light in my visual field.  Thankfully I’m not so deluded as to have thought it was anything more than my sense organ having a conniption.  But when dark gashes started appearing around the periphery of my vision, I began to ruminate about blindness and incapacity.  Frank, of course, routinely carries the sharp sword of wisdom and quietly made an appointment with the eye doctor.  She was a delight; perhaps I only think so because she took me seriously and spent a good chunk of time checking my eyeballs out – inside and out.  No retinal tears (I had already self-diagnosed via Dr. Google)!  What a relief.  I returned to my state of being a superior practitioner feeling quite smug that all that meditation does pay off when you’re having your retina scanned.  Which is, of course, why we meditate, right?

Then the lovely lady informed me that the problems I’ve been having with a burning sensation in my eyes is not allergies.  Since it only happens when I read, it would have been tragic to learn I was allergic to books, Kindles, iPads, and iPhones! No, no allergies.  Hence no quick fixes of antihistamines twice a day.

It was the quality of my tears.  Apparently, my lacrimal glands suck at expressing themselves.  In the realm of aspiring bodhisattvas, this could be a problem.  So I have been faithfully applying hot compresses and massaging my eyelids.  Now instead of burning sensations, they feel like they’re stumbling through a sandstorm.  I am told that this too will pass.

All of this has me thinking about practice.  I know, I know.  I’m always harping about practice but you must admit, I’ve backed off a bit by dropping the ending salutation on each post: “Thank you for practicing.”  It began to feel rather preachy and I couldn’t decide between “practising” the Canadian way and “practicing” the American way.

Nevertheless, it is about practice – and not only because some forms of practice get us through an MRI, a dental exam, a prostate or pap test (yes, gents, we too suffer), or anything else that reminds us of our mortality.  In the Heart Sutra, Avalokita, that great practitioner of compassion (whose lacrimal glands produce high quality tears that are a nectar of healing, I’d imagine) is said to have been engaged in “deep practice” when he/she realized the profoundness of our being.  That’s the first line.   If we never get beyond that line of the short version or never delve into the 125,000 verses, that one phrase is enough.

“Avalokiteshavara, while moving in the deep course of perfect understanding…”

Does it boggle your mind?  It knocked the socks off mine.  Here is someone who has attained enlightenment, defers transcending into absolute boundlessness… and she’s still practicing!

If you haven’t just run out of excuses, I have!

Eminent students [of the Dharma], long accustomed to groping for the elephant, pray do not doubt the true dragon.*

I like my misconceptions.  Actually, it’s more accurate to say I don’t dislike them enough.  In fact, they are so weakly challenged for their right of passage through my inner world that they tend to leave quite a mess behind.  None of this genteel “guests” in the Guesthouse à la Rumi.  And yet, strangely, I like them for the momentary respite they give me from reality.

Then on Monday, Barry at Ox Herding wrote a lovely post on reality to which I commented that “if reality is not optional, then suffering is inevitable.”  So there you have it.  Grope on that elephant all you want; reality will win out when you sit atop it and the tree trunks start moving.

*Maezumi, Hakuyu Taizan, Commentary on Fukanzazengi.  In Loori, John Daido (ed.), The Art of Just Sitting: Essential writings on the zen practice of shikantaza.

PS: Barry has graciously offered his new book The Path of Zen to everyone.  It’s simply beautiful… and very real!  Please click here to obtain a copy.  A deep bow of gratitude for all your teachings, Barry!

Edit: “if reality is optional, then suffering is inevitable.”  Not surprising I’m always confused!

Practice, apparently, is not about recognizing esoteric signs.  Fingers (flipped or no), banners, needles or mallets don’t count.  Nor do Rorschach leavings in the bottom of my ink pots.  Realization of our true nature doesn’t come carefully packaged and delivered by Fed-Ex.  And, listen carefully, it definitely doesn’t arise out of being whacked by a kyosaku, pummelled by a fist, a staff or a shout*.

This is the place we get stuck.  We try to understand enlightenment by our discriminative mind; yet, our discriminative, our discursive thought, is the very thing that binds us.  The question really is how to go beyond, how to transcend that dichotomy.  But we all have to start with that discriminative mind. 

At this point, I am beginning to get the inkling that I’ve wasted precious practice time diving into shallow waters.  But the discriminative mind, the mind that wants to have evidence, steps, and stories, is what we have as the start point.  Perhaps that first tentative step (or sometimes ego-inflated step) is simply to want this because my own suffering is too much and I am willing to take, buy, trade, barter time on the cushion for the promise of relief.

That’s ok.  Unless it stops there.

*Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi, Commentary on Fukanzazengi.  In Loori, John Daido (ed), The Art of Just Sitting, 2nd Edition

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear,
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles in motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River.  Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty. 

Joy Harjo

from How we become human – New and selected poems: 1975-2001

 May we take the utmost care of our practice!

Happy New Year and thank you for your support!

Genju