Category Archives: Eastern Teachers

Teachers primarily of Japanese, Chinese, Korean cultures

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do not stop here

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This is Oliva doing no-mind practice under the kiwi vine.  I want a little bit of this in my practice.

The pesky thing about practice is in what to do about the mind.  In the last post, it wandered around the room like the kid on a tricycle in Billy Collins’ poem Insomnia – (it) will not stop tracing the same tight circle / on the same green threadbare carpet.  Sitting this morning, I took it by its chubby arm, wedged it under the cushion and watched it pop out as soon as my full weight sank into the buckwheat and memory foam.  So I put it

~on the shelf where it berated me for not putting the Cd’s back in alphabetic order.

~on the altar where it flicked at the limp rose petals and sent incense ashes tumbling onto the table.

~in the bell where it found cat hair and dust bunnies holding court.

~on my foot where it tapped a baton sounding a prelude to numbness with a three-part tingling.

~at my nostrils where it began to tickle the edges with the cat hairs it had kept from the bell.

~in that space just under my navel where it pounced and bounced summoning the sensations of anxiety and fear.

It seemed no matter where I placed it and begged it to stop. there. stay. still. just. this. breath. it. be. came. that. place.

I wondered what it would be like to be a little more here and little less stuck to here.

Takuan Soho was a prolific writer, Zen monk, calligrapher and tea master.  In Unfettered Mind are letters written to two sword masters giving advice and criticisms aimed at marrying the spirit of Zen with the way of the sword.  One letter, The Mysterious Record of Immovable Wisdom (Where to Put the Mind) describes how to engage with the mind.  Takuan Soho viewed the mind not as unruly but rather as too easily absorbed into a space where it becomes slave to what is there.

If you should decide on one place and put the mind there, it will be taken by that place and lose its function…  Because this is so, leave aside thoughts and discrimination, throw the mind away from the entire body, do not stop it here and there, and when it does visit these various places, it will realize function, and act without error.

Putting the mind in one place is called falling into one-sidedness.  One-sidedness is said to be bias in one place.  Correctness is moving about anywhere.  The Correct Mind shows itself by extending the mind throughout the body.  It is not biased in any one place.

If the mind moves about the entire body, when the hand is called into action, one should use the mind that is in the hand.  When the foot is called for, one should use the mind that is in the foot.  But if you determine one place in which to put it, when you try to draw it out of that place, there it will stay.  It will be without function.

Keeping the mind like a tied-up cat and not allowing it to wander, when you keep it in check within yourself, within yourself it will be detained.  Forsaking it within your body, it will go nowhere.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju

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spider monkeys

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Odd.  How things come together.  Buddha35 of 108Buddhas was done by inking over a wash of the kanji strokes for the character of Buddha.  (I’m sorry if I’m getting repetitive; it’s just my assumption that most people reading this are arriving here for the first time.)  I like the way the structure turned out – angular but with a softness in the belly.  It also makes a great Rorschach, doesn’t it?  I kept seeing huts and looms until I saw a little creature.

In trying to find a suitable dharma teaching to go with Buddha35, I picked up Thich Nhat Hanh’s little book, The World We Have: a Buddhist approach to peace and ecology.  I’ve skimmed through it occasionally and have had trouble getting into it.  That’s my struggle with Thay’s writings; in the early days of my practice, everything I read of his resonated.  Now… well, it’s hit-and-miss.  That’s just the nature of my impenetrable mind; I think I have to be in deep suffering and torn open by it to really feel the dharma rain.  When life is pinballing along, there tends to be a lot of hubris about my enlightenment as I flash my “do nothing because you’re already there” card.

Anyway, back to TNH’s book.  Actually, back to the Introduction by Alan Weisman.

A few years ago, while researching my book The World Without Us, I visited a tribe in Ecuador whose remaining shred of once bountiful Amazon forest was so depleted that they’d resorted to hunting spider monkeys.  This was especially grim because they believed themselves to be descended from those very primates.  In essence, they’d been reduced to eating their ancestors.

I wanted to go through the chapters of TNH’s book to find something (I was about to type “meaty”) zen-like about my little critter in the painting but, honestly, Weisman’s first paragraph dropped on me like a stone.  Once in a while, a teaching from the past will reach forward and haul me back into the zendo to hear it with cleaned ears.  This was one of those moments.  Thay is fond of the Sutra on the Son’s Flesh – a parable about our greed destroying the future for our children.  It’s a profound teaching on ecology if you can get pass the gruesome imagery of the parents’ eating the son’s flesh to survive their situation.  With Weisman’s real life, real time story, I get it – again.

Spider monkeys and children – killing our past and future.

I have no more words.

Thank you for practicing,

Genju