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How Do We Do It?

How Do We Do It?

Last updated on: August 16, 2009 at 8:15 am by Dosho Port

How Do We Do It? 2009-08-16T08:15:00-06:00 Dosho Port

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In response to my last post, Harry asks, “What is the substantial difference between ‘wallowing’ and the real thing in terms of how we do it?”

I’ve been reflecting on this issue again (see also the chapter in Keep Me in Your Heart Awhile on this) with reading Morton Schlutter’s How Zen Became Zen: The Dispute Over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in the Song-Dynasty China.

At the heart of the silent illumination vs. koan meditation dispute is this same question – how do we do it?

The simple answer is just to practice wholeheartedly. Like the old guy says, “If you concentrate your effort singlemindedly, that in itself is wholeheartedly engaging the Way.”

There is no wallowing in such sitting, standing, walking, lying down.

But what is “single-mindedness?”

I once heard a koan teacher compare the process of working through MU to taking a stick and trying to crack open a large rock. He then demonstrated, hitting an imaginary rock in front of him again and again.

Hongzhi (the winner of the Song Dynasty award, “Mr. Silent Illuminatioin”), on the other hand, describes zazen like this (from Schlutter, p. 145):

In complete silence words are forgotten,
total clarity appears before you.
When you reflect it, it is boundlessly vast,
and your body becomes numinous.

Quite a different quality, eh? More like this image:

One background issue here has to do with personality type. Perhaps the first such typology can be found in Buddhaghosa’s Path of Purification (click here for a talk on this by Ven. U Silananda) with its desire, anger, deluded, faith, intelligent, speculative types (see Buddhist Character Analysis for a nice modern working of these types – click here). The desire type’s positive presentation is through faith; the anger type’s is through intelligence; and the deluded type’s is through speculation.

In the Path of Purification, Buddhaghosa suggests that the meditation teacher first diagnose the student’s type and then assign a meditation practice. For example, the desire type gets to look at phelm and excrement, the anger type does loving kindness, the deluded type is assigned the breath.

Likewise in the Zen context, anger types seem most appropriate for koan introspection while desire types (especially in their “faith” mode) seem most suited to silent illumination.

But shikantaza (earnest vivid sitting) is not silent illumination. Dogen’s great contribution to the Soto line was to dynamically reinvigorate and free the practice – neither silent illumination nor koan – within and through and leaping beyond the paradigms of the dharma.

Just singleminded wholeheartedness. Imho, this practice is appropriate for all types.

But whatever the practice, it arises and vividly comes to life in relationship with a teacher (or a student) and everybody and everything else too. Also, a skilled teacher can probably use any of these practices in such a way that works for different types of students – so long as the student works too.

There are a bunch of issues related to this that I won’t take up for today but for this one: Is a shattering enlightenment experience necessary?

Necessary for what? If the answer to this question is “profound spiritual security” then the answer is “yes.”

Both the Rinzai and Soto ancestors (including Hongzhi and Dogen as well as Katagiri Roshi) noted their enlightenment experiences and consider them as very important.

Students practicing shikantaza as well as koan sometimes shatter. And come back to life.

However, all shattering experiences do not give life. Kaz’s second law of breakthrough is pertinent here (for the other nine,

click here

Some breakthroughs are life-affirming and others destructive.

A close teacher-student relationship can help frame the breakthrough and aftermath in such a way that it is life giving by encouraging a focus on the process (rather than the result), nonattachment, ethical inquiry, and devotion to the freedom of all beings.

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