Opening Traps and Cages Part Three

We are always continuously aware. No matter what our circumstances are, this is true. Awareness is not a feeling or an attitude. It doesn't turn on and off and is not limited to certain kinds of experiences. The waking, sleeping, and dreaming states are all just different modes of being aware. It can't be held or withheld by physical walls or circumstances. It is has no beginning, no end, no boundaries. It cannot be contained and is not a container.

Even when we are in a very densely contracted state, there is awareness of thatstate. If there was not, we would not know how we are feeling, or how our experiencing seems to be. But when we are identifying with a state, it doesn't occur to us to look into how it is that we are aware. Instead, we become preoccupied with the sense of an "I" or a "me" who is at the centre of experiencing, struggling with experience. Struggling to hold on, struggling to be strong, to be clever, to be counted, struggling to overcome, struggling against those details of the world that seem to run contrary to our ideas of how things should be.

This struggle is a mechanism or one could say, a ‘symptom' of self-image. Self- image, the sense of an "I" created through contraction feeds on contraction. The propagation of negative states such as fear, anger, confusion and adversity serve to give weight to the sense of an "I" that is separate from the rest of experiencing, that must struggle with experiencing. And in all of this struggle there is an assumption that this sense of "I" is necessary to awareness. When it is like this, you look at yourself, at the world and what you are most concerned about is where you are located within yourself and within the world. But the truth of the matter is that this sense of "I" is not at all necessary and is in fact, how you make yourself suffer.

It is not difficult to see the folding of attention into obsession with a sense of self. When you are in the monastery you can see it falling into self-consciousness even in the kinhin line. You can see it obsessing with storylines while sitting zazen. You can see it floundering about, worrying about what a Dharma Teacher of practice advisor thinks of you when you are receiving instruction.

We all begin Zen practice with the same instructions - to use the noticing of this sense of self and its endless complexities and discomforts and complaints and obsessions as a prompt to open attention all around it, to the actual details of present experiencing. We practise releasing it by feeling the breath, opening to seeing and hearing, practising environmental mindfulness. 

When you notice something - a sound, a feeling, a thought, the tendency will be to focus on what is noticed and then try to find some centre of concentration in the midst of the noticing, mistaking that feeling of concentration for mindfulness. But just noticing details is not truly Zen practice. Practice is not just a matter of noticing things, of being mindful of things. It is noticing patterns and allowing attention to fall free of patterns, allowing things to present themselves as they are.

We can become fixated in maintaining and propagating obviously contracted states such as fear, resentment, defensiveness, anger and so on. But we can become equally fixated in states such as self-righteousness, idleness, lust, peevishness, and even in ideas about the Dharma or the flattened states of attention we misunderstand as mindfulness. We can become trapped in positive ideas as well as negative ideas.

I'd like to read you a passage from Keizan Jokin zenji's Denkoroku, translated by Ven. Anzan Hoshin roshi and Joshu Dainen roshi:

"That night the Zen Master comes in secret to Huineng and says, "Is the rice clean yet?'

Huineng says, "It is clean but needs to be sifted."

The Master strikes the mortar three times with his staff.

Huineng shakes rice in a sieve three times and enters the Zen Master's room. 

The Master said to him, "Due to the one great matter of manifesting enlightenment within the world the Awakened ones guide beings according to their capacities. There thus came about the Teachings of the ten stages, three vehicles, sudden and gradual enlightenment. As well, the Buddha transmitted the subtle and highest secret Treasury of the Eye of Utter Reality, the luminous Awareness beyond reference point to his senior student, the Venerable Mahakasyapa. This was transmitted through twenty-eight generations to Bodhidharma who then came to China and found the Great Master Huike. It has continued thus until it has come down to me. I now pass on to you the treasure of the Dharma and the robe that has been passed to successors. Maintain the Dharma well and do not let it cease." 

Huineng knelt down and received the Dharma and the robe. He asked, "In transmitting the Dharma, what does giving this robe have to do with it?"

Zen Master Hongren said, "When Bodhidharma came to China a long time ago, people knew nothing about Zen and so he passed on the robe as a visible sign of attainment. Now people trust Zen, but the robe has become something to dispute over. Just let it stop with you and don't pass it on. Now you should leave and conceal yourself far from here until the time is ripe for you to begin to teach. Your life will be in as much danger while you carry this robe as if it hung from a thread"

Huineng said, "Where should I conceal myself?"

Hongren said, "Pause for a while when you come to Huai and then dwell hidden for a while at Hui."

Huineng bowed and then left with the robe. Zen Master Hongren personally escorted him to the river crossing at the foot of Mount Huangmei; there Huineng said, "You should turn back now. I have already realized the Way and so I should ferry myself across."

Hongren said, "Although you have attained the Way, still I shall ferry you across." So saying, he took up a pole and pushed the boat across to the other shore with Huineng and then Hongren returned to the monastery alone. The community knew nothing about what had happened. 

After this, the Master no longer ascended the Hall and gave no more discourses. When monks came and asked him about this, he said, "My Way has gone."

Someone asked, "Who has the robe and the Dharma?"

Hongren said, "The able one has them."

People knew that he must mean Huineng because "neng" means "able." When they searched for him he was nowhere to be found. Then they knew that he had indeed taken the robe and the Dharma and so they went after him.

At that time there was a monk called Huiming there who had been a general in the army. It was he who led the gang chasing after Huineng. They caught up to him in the Dayu mountain range.

Huineng thought, "This robe is a symbol of trust. I won't fight over it." He put the robe and bowl down upon a stone and hid himself in the woods.

Huiming approached and tried to grab up the robe and bowl but, although he strained with all his might, he was unable to lift them. Huiming began to tremble and said, "I have come for the Dharma, not a robe."

Huineng came out and sat down on the stone. Huiming bowed and said, "Please, reveal the essential Dharma."

Huineng said, "Without thinking of good or bad, what is your Original Face?"

Hearing this, Huiming had great awakening. He asked, "Is there any further mystery you have to tell me?"

Huineng said, "What I have to tell you is no mystery. Turning the movement of thought, the mystery is within this."

Huiming said, "Although I studied with Hongren at Huangmei, I never truly knew my own Face. Now, receiving your Teaching I feel like someone who drinks water and knows first hand whether it is cool or warm. You are my Teacher."

Huineng said, "So it is, but Hongren is the Teacher of us both."

Huiming bowed and thanked him and set off. In later years he became an abbot and changed his name to Daoming, not using "Hui" out of respect for Huineng."

This is the background to one of the most fundamental koan and questions of our practice, the Original Face, and the Transmission of the Dharma. 

As Anzan roshi tells this story, Huiming had been a general in the army before becoming a monk. One day, he just could not continue to kill, to order others to kill, to smell the stench of death. And so he walked off the battlefield and into the monastery of Hongren. He approached his practice as a soldier, fighting away sleepiness, gritting his teeth through pain. Regardless of the instructions he received, he still approached the Dharma as he had everything else. When Huiming heard that the Dharma had been Transmitted to Huineng, he was enraged. He set off to reclaim the robe and bowl, the symbols of the Transmission. He was fixated and trapped in his ideas of what the Dharma was, what Transmission was, and who was worthy or unworthy of it. He gathered up a gang and led them on an assault against Huineng. He was the first to scramble up the mountainside.

When he saw the robe and bowl left out on a stone for them he grabbed for them. But froze. He just couldn't do it. The basic sincerity, the basic humanity, that caused him to give up his military career roused itself. He trembled. Like a bird shaking itself free from a trap, he trembled. At that moment he was finally ready to truly practise deeply. And so he was open to what the Sixth Ancestor Huineng presented to him with his question, "What is your Original Face?" What is the primordial context, the open space, in which all contents, all experiences arise. After hearing this, the tendency may be to try to think about it, to arrive at some kind of answer to the question "What is your Original Face?" But if you do that you will be entirely missing the point. The question must be asked with the whole bodymind and is not to be found in the words. Until such time as you begin formal koan practice under the direction of a Teacher please stay with the simplicity of the instructions for basic mindfulness you have been given which are teaching you to release contraction and question with the whole bodymind. As Anzan roshi has said about koan, "reality itself is the real question."

Begin opening to reality, to the context in which all contents and all experiences arise by practising releasing attention from the constraints of self-image. Open to the sensations of the breath, the body, the details of seeing, of hearing. There's nothing to hold on to, nothing to attain, nothing to push or pull, nothing to figure out. Just sit. Just practise.

You can escape the trap of locating yourself behind the eyes, in the cage of the head, by opening to fingers and toes and the world of ten directions. And it's so simple. The world is right here, all around. And while awareness is not anything that you think it is, there is always already awareness available. Please, don't trap yourself. Don't cage yourself. As the Roshi once said to me, over and over again for many hours one very long night, "Come out." And "Come out and play." So I eventually did. And so can you. Right now.