Tag Archives: zen

Unknown's avatar

letting go of holding on

by

From the Bodhidharma Anthology by Jeffrey Broughton: Entering the path through practice – seeking nothing.

The sutra says: “Seeking is all suffering; seeking nothing is joy.”

I love the twists and turns of this third practice.  Seek nothing.  This is joy.  Yet joy is one of the worldly winds that blow up the dust storms!  Gotcha!

And yet.  And yet…

Much of our path has likely been laid down by seeking and joy in the finding.  Now here’s the part we forget: it’s also tamped down by the letting go and the losing.

Broughton footnotes a story about Merit and Darkness who are sisters.  They travel together and it is not possible to invite one in without the other.  Nor is it possible to drive one away without the other leaving too.  While I like this fable, it only addresses the extremes of our clinging and aversion.  To stretch the metaphor, we can’t shine the light on one segment of our path without casting others into darkness.  Practice requires attention not only to our clinging to the lit path and aversion to the dark beyond but also to the edge where light meets dark.  This is liminal ground where transformation occurs; its presence in awareness is constantly negotiated by our open-heartedness.

In my own practice, I try (oh, I try and try) to stay with the transitions between light and dark, earth and air, heaven and hell.  The extreme manifestations are no-brainers to meet and resolve.  It’s the sliding away and into from one to the other and back again that calls for a deeper commitment.  This is where a rigid holding on to what is, what it must become, what it cannot emerge as results in suffering.

This practice of not seeking, wishing for nothing, is a practice of unhooking from a specific outcome, untying the knot that keeps us chained to the shifting winds of fortune.  It is in the merging and emerging of lightness and darkness.

Unknown's avatar

blowing away the covering of adventitious dust

by

From the Bodhidharma Anthology by Jeffrey Broughton, Text 2: Two Entrances

Now, in entering the path there are many roads.  To summarize them, they reduce to two types.  The first is entrance by principle and the second entrance by practice.  Entering by principle means that one awakens to the thesis by means of the teachings, and one deeply believes that all living beings, common and sagely, are identical to the True Nature; that it is merely because of the unreal covering of adventitious dust that the True Nature is not revealed.

Bodhidharma continues, saying that “wall-gazing” or “those who meditate on walls (Red Pine)” come to this realization that we are, none of us, different or separate from each other.  

I’ve read this passage over and over.  It makes sense; it doesn’t make sense.  I know it but I don’t sense into it.  I know it as I sense into it.  Over the past few weeks, I’ve sat with the question of my path.  What is it?  What is its form, its content, its texture, its sound, taste, touch, smell?  I am well-enough versed in the zennish jargon to spin some yarn around this questioning.  And I’m sufficiently high-functioning in my delusional process to believe it – and skillful enough to draw you into a folie à deux.  And then it hit me: it’s all dust.

There’s nothing to resolve.  I’m dust.  You’re dust.  We all fall down!

Earlier last week, I was consulting with a friend whose profession comes in very handy when I need to have tight-lipped conversations about threat assessment and ways to create safety.  (Apparently hiring a hunk of a body-guard is not part of the plan!)  I mentioned that all this talk about threat and protective strategies ran counter to my principles.  As difficult as it may be, I work hard at not launching my strategies from a base of fear.  That path of gut-wrenching anxiety, fear, is well-known and not one I care to travel because it’s viral and an accelerant to an already volatile and unpredictable process.

Besides, I understand what’s happening in this dynamic.  We respond from our suffering and project its cause on the nearest, closest, most intimate target, I explained.  Caught in our delusion, we believe the suffering to be the threat and conflate it with the person we believe is causing that suffering.  It’s handy.  It’s the adventitious dust that grinds into the eyeballs and has us shaking a fist to the Fates and all beings.  If there is any difference between me and the other, it is only in the shape of the dust piles.

And a resolution only needs one of us to know this.