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Tag: ikkyu

December 9, 2009

buddhas, dead beats & renovations

I hate change.  I hate change but I love renovation.  Renovation is not change – any more than enlightenment is elevation from the murk of being human.

Those of you who visit regularly (Thank you!) can see from the new blog format I was in a renovating mood yesterday.  It was a good day for changing the way the brain perceives things.  After all, it was Bodhi Day – the day we honor the Buddha’s enlightenment.  This time of year, with deeper darkness encroaching, it’s a good time to celebrate anything that requires lots of candles and cookies.  That’s what we did in sangha.  Everyone brought cookies and candles.  We sat three rounds of meditation, limped walking meditation in between, and closed a circle for cookies and tea.  An earlier call for a Dharma cookie swap resulted in ginger cookies, green tea shortbread, regular shortbread, oatmeal chocolate chip, and a bottle of mixed nuts.  Good nourishment for this collection of enquiring minds.

The question of the night was whether the Buddha was a dead beat dad.  From today’s perspective, I suspect one might call him that.  Leaving wife and kid in the middle of the night, throwing over his responsibilities, wandering around homeless.  How else to view it?  It’s an eternal question: how to respect the teachings if the teacher isn’t living up to our standards.  I might have gone on a bit in the Buddha’s defense, that we have to see the story of the Buddha as allegory and, if taken literally, see it in the context of the sociocultural structure and mores of the times.  There are volumes written on this and I am no scholar on the topic.  What I struggle with when I consider the roots and then the branches and fruit of this practice is how to reconcile enlightenment as relational and a history that says differently.

No answers there.  I just struggle with it.  Maybe the renovations will happen next year.  For now I’m enjoying Grace Schireson’s Zen Women.  She’s much better at working through the details of how practice is relational.

I see today my dharma brother Barry at Ox Herding has captured the essence of Buddha-hood in this day and age.

Why are people called Buddhas

After they die?

Because they don’t grumble any more.

Because they don’t make a nuisance of themselves any more.

Ikkyu

It makes me feel better now, when I grouse at our sangha.  It would be terrible if they thought I was a Buddha and missed the opportunity to practice loving kindness at my every grumble and nuisance.

I hope you enjoy the new digs.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

6 comments
October 30, 2009

intimate sound

ikkyupoem3

Another characteristic of sumi painting is that with sumi painting you have to listen to the rhythm of the universe, the rhythm of the world….  (M)ind is like the sound of the pine breeze in the sumi painting.  There, on the paper, is the pine tree… And you can feel the breeze, and the sound of the breeze, from the painting. (from Breeze in the sumi painting in Returning to Silence by Dainin Katagiri)

Not knowing the pine tree as root, branch and bark opens me to a deeper, more intimate knowing.  Intimacy is a deep otobwunderstanding of the pine tree – so deep that the feel of the breeze, the sound of the wind through its branches is evoked through the most subtle of forms.  A line, a space, a curve, a gaze, a touch, glint of golden sunlight there in black ink on white space.

And then gone.


From our friend Ikkyu again:

without beginning,
utterly without end,
the mind is born
to struggle and distresses,
and dies – and that is emptiness.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

Images from top: Ikkyu poem in grass script; kanji character oto /sound

2 comments
October 29, 2009

white space

White is one color, but from white, space is created, and many colors.  From this you can see the huge scale of the world. (from Breeze in the sumi painting in Returning to Silence by Dainin Katagiri)


Without the emptiness of white space, the wind in the pines cannot be captured, cannot blow cool and gentle across the sky in the paper.

Emptiness is form; form is contained by emptiness.

My favourite verse in the Tao te Ching is verse #11 (from the Feng & English translation):

kazebw1thirty spokes share the wheel’s hub;
it is the center hole that makes it useful.
shape clay into a vessel;
it is the space within that makes it useful.
cut doors and windows for a room;
it is the holes which make it useful.

What space fills your heart?


Thank you for practising,

Genju

Image: Kanji character for kaze / wind

2 comments
October 28, 2009

black ink

what kind of thing is kokoro
I cannot say -
it is painted in ink…
the sound of wind in the pines

Ikkyu (translation by Stephen Addiss)


matsubwSumi painting uses just black ink and a brush.  Black ink is black ink, but black ink is not black as a single color. Katagiri roshi (Returning to Silence) draws our attention to the subtle color in black.  When I draw a pine tree or the kanji character that is in effect the abstraction of a pine tree, I’m drawing the tree, the ground, the sky, and all the beings that inhabit the environment containing this lone pine.  You may not immediately perceive it; it’s a collection of black lines after all! But perhaps, you can sense what these lines evoke in you.  A scent, an outline along a ridge, birdsong, a rustle of movement in the needles under the branches.


Thank you for practising,

Genju

Image: Kanji character matsu/pine tree

1 comment
October 27, 2009

touching the heart

shin0

What kind of thing is kokoro (heart)?
I cannot say…

There is an openness in Stephen Addiss’ translation of the first two lines of Ikkyu’s poem.  It’s an invitation to enter the aspect of life that cannot be spoken to through the intellect.  It’s also an invocation of an aspect of my life which often slides away from me.  The idea of not knowing conjures up much anxiety:

not knowing what
not knowing how
not knowing when

Zen stories abound with the idea of not knowing.  They repeatedly say “not knowing is the most intimate.”  It’s taken a long time for me to accept that “not knowing” is not “being ignorant.”  Nor is it “not caring.”  At the same time, to say “I don’t know” is a death knell in our current culture of information addiction.  Power and control are now exerted through knowledge.  But knowledge is not the same as knowing.

Perhaps that’s the difference.  In practice, to say “I don’t know” is not about knowledge.  It is experiencing this life as it is, for what it is.  It is realizing that anything is possible and – like it or not – I will end up intimately participating in it.

shin1

Knowing has no doubts.  It is “just exactly so”; from the bottom of our heart, we say “Yes.”  (From Returning to Silence by Dainin Katagiri).

shin2

Allowing the brush to carve the lines for shin (heart/mind), I have to be willing to “not know”, to be open to all possibilities of edge, tip, and ink.  The form of the character for shin or heart/mind is simple shin3enough; a schematic of the physical heart, the organ.  Yet when I bring together breath, body, brush, and ink, there is no knowledge of technique that will help.  There is simply the sensation of our relationship whose only trace is the black ink line.

The final goal is that we have to participate in intimacy itself.  We have to live there.  This means we have to live in the samsaric world.

shin4

The experience of intimacy is not a particular practice we have to do, separate from everyday life.  We have to see intimacy within the form of everyday routine.  Everyday routine is the practice of intimacy.  This is the basic practice that we have to carry on forever.


shin5

To not know what kind of thing is the heart allows for all possibilities to be openhearted.  It becomes a progression from the strict form of a character to a spacious yet subtle notation that is the beating of my heart.

Thank you for practising,

Genju

2 comments
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