Bringing It All Back Home

"Bringing it all back home"? Well, not really - not if the journey itself is home. Yet, thinking about it, the words are not entirely without sense.

I was looking back at the beginning of all my blogs and read again how Dogen spoke of the mind - of the mind not as thoughts and concepts, but as "trees, fence posts, tiles and grasses." It made me understand more another teaching of Dogen, that when we approach the "10,000 things" we are deluded, but when they are allowed to come to us we are enlightened. 

As I see it, what all this is about is the need to walk and look and see the world, whereas, alas, we can bury our head in a map. Our "self" has mapped it all out and we see only that which we have been conditioned to see. Our mind is full of concepts and thoughts and therefore the world about us is in fact never seen. As one wit has said, we choose to have the menu and leave the feast uneaten. 

Menu or the feast itself?

I wonder what it is that breaks us out of our shell. Perhaps one necessary step is the recognition that we are in fact in one! I think this is why Buddhism insists that our life is totally one of suffering, dukkha. In another context, another Faith, no one not conscious of sin will seek a saviour. 

Well, back to bringing it all back home, and thinking through this entire series of blogs. While rambling and waffling, I have also been reading, playing the guitar, reading, enjoying the grandchildren, and reading. While reading I often transfer passages to my cyberspace Notebook as they strike me. As a prelude to this attempt to put a lid upon these blogs (at least for the time being) I have returned to my Notebook and read through several of the jottings. Is there a theme amid my ramblings and notes? Can I capture one round of the spiral that can be called a journey and that can also be called home? Probably not. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.

I do see that the grounding is Faith. Trust. Not "belief". 

Basically I believe nothing. Just how passive can you get? But Wittgenstein once spoke of a state of mind that "perhaps others have known", of feeling absolutely safe, with the thought that nothing can hurt you. That is as close as I can get to faith as I know it, and strangely I do not see it as contradicting the essence of the Pure Land verse:- 

Whether heading for the Pure Land

 or falling to hell,

 all is in Amida's hands.

 Namu-amida-butsu! 

There is a little phrase of Saint Anselm of Canterbury contained in his "proofs" of God's existence. He spoke of "faith seeking understanding". I'm not really interested in his proofs, but I have some empathy with the idea of faith seeking understanding. So I ask just why on earth should I feel safe? 

Safe........but keep the hat ready?

Am I in some form of fool's paradise, a product purely of good fortune, resting in, and satisfied by, a contentment untested by fire? It could well be so, yet I cannot deliberately go and seek bad fortune to find if "my anchor holds". 

Moving on, another theme that figures prominently in both blogs and notebook is non-dualism, which is embarrassing in a way, given the discussions I have had in the past on various forums where I often argued with those who advocated it. Thinking back, perhaps some on those Forums expressed it badly, with one or two even saying equivalents of "the cypress tree in the garden" when attempting some sort of answer to my queries and objections. It does still seem to me that many understood the whole thing as "all is one" rather than that all is not two. Another thing entirely. 

Perhaps a Western version of "the cypress tree in the garden"

Looking into the thought and teachings of Dogen - or better, looking into the practice of Dogen - he sought a realistic affirmation and transformation of what was relative, finite, and temporal in a non-dualistic vision of the self and the world. He understood liberation not as a fixed form or static state, but as a flowing form or continuous activity of study, practice, and verification.

To understand duality lucidly and to penetrate it thoroughly within a nondualistic mode of existence was Dogen's final solution.

 Opposites or dualities were not obliterated or even blurred; they were not so much transcended as they were realized. 

(Both of the above from "Eihei Dogen - Mystical Realist" by Hee-Jin Kim)

Well, enough of that. I only insist that for myself I am seeking clarity, even seeking an understanding of faith. We each have our own path. My apologies if others only find a blurring from reading my ramblings.

My apologies

Having said that, I see also that I am often seeking, and in fact seeing and finding, a unity of understanding in the lives of others throughout time. A unity that is not the product of all being compelled to sing from the same hymn sheet, or a unity of a creedal formula, but of an existential search that always has its genesis in the living of a concrete human life in one particular time and place; a unity that finds "truth" not as a state (stasis) but as a dynamic, the unfolding of emptiness, an on-going creativity. Truth that is absolute only as an "appropriate statement of a whole lifetime", within the moment. 

And to add, part of my jottings draw upon a summary of how the ancient Greeks understood "truth".......never losing sight of wisdom, of a fuller understanding of life as a unified whole; a truth that included action, living well, and not just one of definitions and logical arguments. "The wise know that truth and goodness and beauty are inseparably unified". So thank you to the Greeks.

But no hymn sheet

Well, enough for now. What clarity I have must settle. Thank you.

Related Quotes:- 

Truth to tell, we do not know who we are - and that is who we are. 

(John Caputo, from "The Truth")

......truth is a form of life, not merely the property of a proposition. 

(John Caputo)

If you want to find satisfactory formulas you had better deal with things that can be fitted into a formula. The vocation to seek God is not one of them. Nor is existence. Nor is the spirit of man. 

(Thomas Merton)

.....the modern mind engages the world within an explicit experiential structure of being a subject set apart from, and in some sense over against, an object. The modern world is full of objects, which the human subject confronts and acts upon from its unique position of conscious autonomy. By contrast, the primal mind engages the world more as a subject embedded in a world of subjects, with no absolute boundaries between or among them. In the primal perspective, the world is full of subjects. The primal world is saturated with subjectivity, interiority, intrinsic meanings and purposes.

(Richard Tarnas, from "Cosmos and Psyche")

As long as you remain in the dual extremes,

How can you know they're of one kind?

If you don't know they're of one kind,

You will lose efficacy in both realms....

......two exist because of one...

(Seng Ts'an, from "Poem on the True Mind")

..........the Buddhist doctrine of means in which the means in question is not transcendence of duality but realization of it.

(Hee-Jin Kim, on Dogen)

  

Demarcation Lines

I was pondering again on Holy Books and the authority of texts. Just who gives them the authority? Just who decides which are "holy" and which can join the others in the dustbin of history, the ones that never made it into the official canon?

Authority. Now we've decided who to follow....

 Looking closely at the Christian tradition I find that there are in fact various canons, so I suppose first we must choose just which authority we trust, Catholic, Protestant or perhaps even the Armenian, who have a Third Letter to the Corinthians. Are there others? Maybe. Whatever, once we have our very own Canon of choice we must then determine which interpretation to go with. I will leave it there. 

Translation or Interpreting. Which is which?

One thing I did find in my Googling was that the Eastern Churches had, "in general, a weaker feeling than those in the West for the necessity of making a sharp delineation with regard to the canon", that they were "more conscious of the gradation of spiritual quality among the books they accepted."

In Buddhism too there is a Canon, the Pali Theravada Tipitaka, pictured here:- 

What price Zen, the doctrine beyond words and letters? (Though the Therevada is very strong on what is known as the "Silence of the Buddha")

 But when we get to the Mahayana no such canon exists, just a virtually never ending succession of Sutras, the "spiritual quality" of which seems to be decided by just which of them have stood the test of time and remained favorites for study and devotion. Just a bit more democratic, for better or worse, and possibly one reason why the Mahayana is called the "Great Vehicle" (of salvation). Ultimately I see it as leading to being able to find "authority" in virtually anything, or as Saichi once exclaimed, Namu-amida-butsu is blooming everywhere!

Blooming everywhere!

Now that I have got rid of demarcation lines I can drift onto speaking of one particular text and verses that I have found "spiritual quality" in. 

The Suttanipata, which I have mentioned in a previous blog, contains the famous Loving Kindness Sutta, often memorised in full by lay folk of the Theravada tradition. It contains the following two verses:-

Verse 149

Just as a mother would protect her son,

her only son, with her own life,

so one should develop toward all beings 

a state of mind without boundaries.

Verse 150

And toward the whole world

one should develop loving-kindness,

a state of mind without boundaries -

above, below, and across -

unconfined, without enmity, without adversaries. 

("Without boundaries" certainly keeps me on topic for once)

 But I have to wonder again about the authority of words. Would the first thought of some, in reading the above two verses, be to compare them with the great Hymn to Love of St Paul in the New Testament? And if so, what would be the point or purpose in doing so? Are some words better than others? Do some enshrine the "holy spirit", carry the power to transform, while others do not?

 I'm reminded again, even as I ramble, of the words quoted before from the Bodhicharyavatara, of how "like a blind man finding a precious gem" inside some heap of dust, "by some strange chance, bodhichitta (selfless love) has been born in me." How do we find the capacity to love? Can it ever be purely by choice?

 For me, whatever love we have, whatever love we share, is pure gift, the unfolding of grace. As another has said, the Tao can only be shared, never divided. To think it "ours", attained, is to divide it. Divided into "Mine" and "yours", "Christian" love and "Buddhist" love. And therefore into wars, crusades and inquistions.

Faith does not arise

Within ourselves

The entrusting heart is itself

Given by the Other Power. 

(Rennyo)

Love or the entrusting heart, whatever. And as Saichi said when asked to speak of the Other Power:-

Yes, but there is neither self power nor Other Power

What is, is the graceful acceptance only.

Related Quotes:-

  If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. 

(Meister Eckhart)

When eating fruit think of the person who planted the tree. 

(Anon)

To say "How grateful!" is a lie; the truth is, there is nothing the matter; and there is nothing more that makes one feel at home. Namu-amida-butsu! Namu-amida-butsu!

(From Saichi's Journals)

Gratitude is All a Lie (Cancelled)

Thinking of what next to ramble on about, I hit upon the words of the myokonin Saichi, that "Gratitude is all a lie". 

A myokonin by the way is, simply put, a Pure Land saint. The word literally means a "wondrous excellent person". Maybe that can give the wrong impression, but just to say that the "excellence" consists of knowing oneself as wretched yet still "one" with Amida.

Saichi was a cobbler by trade. Happy enough in his wretchedness.

As in:-

There is no bottom to Saichi's wickedness; there is no bottom to Saichi's goodness; how happy I am for the gift! Namu-amida-butsu! (From Saichi's Journals)

Anyway, moving on, Saichi often gives voice to his gratitude. In fact, reading through his Journals the word gratitude figures very often indeed. But then comes the cry:- "Gratitude is all a lie!", then:- "Gratitude is a fraud!" And why? "Because there is nothing the matter with one!" says Saichi. 

Well, I was going to do a blog on this but quite frankly I am not ready. I have no idea just what Saichi is on about - or at least, it is immersed in a thick mist and perhaps best left there for the moment; the contradiction I see perhaps to be resolved at another level.

However, for now, within that thick mist I hear again the words of Eckhart:-

 Love has no why

It strikes me now just how close those words come to nihilism.

Maybe it does. So much for logic.

 No "why"? Again it strikes me how easy it is, when in the non-dual world of much "eastern" thought, to judge it nihilistic. Here are the words of Hee-Jin Kim as he speaks of the thought of Dogen, the 13th century zen master:-

  To cast off the body-mind did not nullify historical and social existence so much as to put it into action so that it could be the self-creative and self-expressive embodiment of Buddha-nature. In being "cast off", however, concrete human existence was fashioned in the mode of radical freedom - purposeless, goalless, objectless, and meaningless. Buddha-nature was not to be enfolded in but was to unfold through, human activities and expressions. The meaning of existence was finally freed from and authenticated by its all-too-human conditions only if, and when, it lived co-eternally with ultimate meaninglessness.

 Put this with the "emptying ourselves" of Eckhart, and of God therefore having to (or must! - see previous blog) enter in, put this with Love has no why - again from Eckhart - and we find "east" and "west" joined at the hip! 

Actually I did not start this blog with any intention of it leading towards any ecumenical/inter-faith outcome, but now its here, I'm impressed! And grateful! 

I should have just titled this "Gratitude", where I would have been on clearer ground. But no matter. 

Now I think of it, I remember a Christian gentleman insisting that one needed a God to thank for all our gifts, that a Buddhist could not feel gratitude. The zen man, Thich Nhat Hanh, was unimpressed by such a claim, having woken up each morning for many a year, full of gratitude for the precious gift of the day ahead. Illogical? 

What has logic to do with anything.

Thich Nhat Hanh being illogical

Related Quotes:-

  If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. 

(Meister Eckhart)

When eating fruit think of the person who planted the tree. 

(Anon)

To say "How grateful!" is a lie; the truth is, there is nothing the matter; and there is nothing more that makes one feel at home. Namu-amida-butsu! Namu-amida-butsu!

(From Saichi's Journals)

The Contact of Two Liberties

When I was waffling a few blogs ago of each of us having our very own question I said that I had never actually found what mine was (Maybe it had just been lost amid a sea of questions!)

Which one is mine?

But my memory was jogged by one question - perhaps more a query -  that often occupied my mind a few years ago, and one I raised then on a few Forums. I always labelled my query "The Contact of Two Liberties". 

I think I need to set the scene so that others who may have stumbled upon this blog can at least have some chance of capturing exactly what I am on about.

My question/query was occasioned by an exchange between Thomas Merton and Aldous Huxley, a correspondence found in "The Hidden Ground of Love", Merton's letters on religious experience and social concerns. Merton was seeking dialogue with Huxley on the use of drugs to induce mystical states, a use that Huxley was advocating and Merton had doubts about.

First up, Merton admitted that he was unable to be clear himself as far as the distinction between natural and supernatural, of exactly what the dividing line between the two might be. Nevertheless, he saw a true mystical experience as necessarily being a contact of two liberties, and therefore not procurable by drugs. Obviously, for Merton, one of those two liberties would be God - God not as "object" or as "Him up there", but as "I Am" or simply "Am" (Merton's words) He then goes on to speak more of such "liberty" i.e. liberty as "a free gift", "a free act of love". 

Free? Still there can be arguments!

At the time I was myself moving away from "Him up there" and towards the idea of the Divine as the Ground of Being, the "hidden ground of love". But I was still disturbed by certain assertions found in the sermons of Meister Eckhart, where  Eckhart claimed that if we "empty ourselves" then God must enter in. So, no choice, all determined purely by the way things are. To my mind, as it was then, something, somewhere, seemed to be in danger of being lost.

The Hidden Ground of Love

Obviously a lot of this revolves around the free will versus determinism debate, an ongoing conundrum still unresolved - and I would say, unresolvable. But for me, then, and now, such debate holds no interest. Freedom is experienced and, subjectively, we live by choice. Appeals to determinism - especially as "justification" - are for me a cop out.

No end to the arguments

Well, for better or worse, I have since moved onwards, from the Ground of Being to non-theism, then to non-duality! I have found that nothing has been lost, just clarity gained - irrespective of how unclear my ramblings are to others! 

Why speak only of two liberties? There are infinite liberties. Why speak only of "contact"? Why not speak of inter-being? 

Each moment is a gift within such inter-being, each moment potentially a moment of love, a love that has no why. 

For me the distinction between natural and supernatural just does not exist. To insist upon such a division only creates problems. "Am" has been from the very beginning and has no need to "enter" when we "empty ourselves". And I would say that the words of Lama Govinda, that the only extension to the present is intensity, points towards better distinctions.

Then again, is "intensity" the correct word?

Intensity? Too much "calculation"?

 Related Quotes:- 

"All the greatest and most important problems are fundamentally unsolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown." 

(Carl Jung)

Karma and it's Fruits

A poem by Brian Bilston recently featured on Facebook. Called "Refugees" it went like this:-

They have no need of our help

So do not tell me

These haggard faces could belong to you or me

Should life have dealt a different hand

We need to see them for who they really are

Chancers and scroungers

Layabouts and loungers

With bombs up their sleeves

Cut-throats and thieves

They are not

Welcome here

We should make them

Go back to where they came from

They cannot

Share our food

Share our homes

Share our countries

Instead let us

Build a wall to keep them out

It is not okay to say

These are people just like us

A place should only belong to those who are born there

Do not be so stupid to think that

The world can be looked at another way

(now read from bottom to top)

Well, whatever is thought of that (and it first made me think of how we see things and how we all see differently, even though "samsara and nirvana are one" and we "all have Buddha Nature") I eventually zeroed in on the line "should life have dealt a different hand". Could there have ever been a different hand dealt? Various doctrines, beliefs, creeds all jostled for position. Karma and the words from the OT, "as you sow so shall you reap". Then, as usual with me, some words of Thomas Merton came to mind, from his "Raids on the Unspeakable", where he spoke of the deeper question of the nature of reality itself:-

the world of consistency is the world of justice.........

but justice is not the final word.........

mercy liberates from all the rigid and deterministic structures...............

Law is consistent. Grace is "inconsistent".

Consistency

There was an English football manager, Glen Hoddle (known as Glenda by his detractors) who once got into hot water for suggesting that those born with physical defects were inheriting bad karma from a previous life. Sadly, this was a perfect example of mixing up various beliefs of "east" and "west" with a bit of New Age thrown in and coming up with some unpalatable nonsense. Anyway, Glen (or Glenda) got the sack and the world moved on. 

Glen Hoddle

At that time I was aware that karma was far more profound a doctrine, at least according to a few Suttas to be found in the Majjhima Nikaya and one or two other Buddhist texts. But now, I was given pause to consider just how mercy could cut across karma, interrupt the "reaping what we sow", enter any deterministic world and offer another perspective, another way of being and knowing. 

Having considered, paused, I find little left to say. Pure acceptance, of others as well as oneself, is both Grace and Mercy. Anyone wishing to remain within a world of justice, of calculation, of judgement, can do so. After acceptance a degree of diversification can follow, but Mercy Rules OK. As the poet above, Brian Bilston, has written elsewhere......."amongst the rubble of reality were found traces of humanity and an understanding that stretches beyond borders."

Seeing/knowing with the eye of consistency - is there another way?

Related Quotes:-

Karmic law is inconceivable

And only understood by the Omniscient

(Shantideva, The Bodhicharyavatara, Chapter 4, Verse 7)

For I am like a blind man who has found

A precious gem inside a heap of dust.

For so it is, by some strange chance,

That bodhichitta has been born in me.

(Shantideva, The Bodhicharyavatara, Chapter 3, Verse 28)