Kusen by Richard Reishin Collins, Abbot
New Orleans Zen Temple
Winter Sesshin
Saturday, December 28, 2024
There is much to misunderstand in Zen teachings. Never take any instruction or description or pronouncement to be absolute—including this one.
Here and now, for example, does not mean just here and just now.
“Without benefit of words or writing” does not mean don’t listen or don’t read.
“Thinking not thinking” does not mean not to think, nor does it not mean not-to-think.
In the same vein, “just sitting,” as you well know, does not mean just sitting.
The Mahayana Buddhist path of Zen is steep (the peakless mountain) but it is also wide (the shoreless river). It is not flat, not narrow. Discipline is important, but so is letting go. Zen may look exclusive from the outside, but from the inside of practice it is all inclusive. It is not either/or; Zen is both/and and neither/nor.
Misunderstandings about Zen can be pernicious, harmful. Too much emphasis on “here and now,” for example, can lead to self-absorption, hedonism, a lack of consideration for others. Being present does not mean a denial of the past or an evasion of the future, not at all. The present moment includes past and future. If we are always wrapped up in the present moment alone, we can never learn from our past mistakes and successes; we will never be prepared for what might come in the future. Here-and-now refers to the fact that the past and future exist only in the present, and when we truly live in the present we also embrace the consequences of the past and the responsibilities of the future. This is the karma which accompanies us into the present and the karma we are creating for the future in the present.
On the wall here in this dojo in the mountains of Tennessee hangs a calligraphy that says: “No calendar in the mountain monastery.” Yet, as the end of the year comes upon us, it is important to reflect on and to sit with the here-and-now of past-and-future. In the closing days of the year, we can pretend to claim some perspective on this concluding chapter of the year, acknowledging of course that calendars are an artificial reckoning of time and being.
If you have not read Dogen’s “Uji” (or “Being-Time”), read it now. If you have already read it, read it again; it will look different to the time being you are now. Since you can’t read Dogen in the same way you would study a text for a class, go ahead and struggle with it, wrestle with it, sit with it, absorb it. It is one long koan, so don’t expect to master it with your thinking brain. You must embrace it with your whole being, like any other koan life gives you.
“Uji” is not an easy read. One thing Dogen makes clear, though, is that we are time beings. Our existence unfolds exclusively in time; time is how we “be.” We must grasp that we are only here for the time being: this is impermanence, this is mujo, this is Buddha Nature. It is not an idea, not a concept. It is an irreducible premise of our existence.
This is one reason we come back to sesshin, to remind us that when we waste time we waste being. We usually think of wasting time as doing nothing, but doing nothing saves being, as so many of the ancient Chinese poets told us: idleness is a virtue. Idleness unmasks the emptiness of much activity.
Even these truths are only half-truths. Truth-seekers don’t last very long in Zen practice. They eventually go to teachers who have no doubts, to practices that prop up their egos with self-improvement and virtue-signaling, to religions that reassure us that yes we are indestructible if only we sign over our eternal souls.
Truth seekers have a hard time with Zen, however, because they want the simple answers, preferably set out in a list. They want the Ten Commandments or the Four Noble Truths, the Ten or One-Hundred-and-Eight Precepts, black and white, good and evil. Zen gives us something more difficult to digest: the way things really are, beyond the dichotomies that allow language to spawn delusive systems like politics and religion so that their distortions might hold power over us, tell us what is true and false. But the truth never looks like the truth. The truth is always—and can only be—half-truth. Zazen—and sesshin—are meant to verify and clarify our experience of reality. Nothing more, nothing less.
We are not here to provide answers to all questions. We come to sesshin to sit with the mysteries. We stimulate doubt, we bask in perplexity, we muddy the waters. But from muddy waters come beautiful flowers.
Sunflower Trail, Stone Nest Dojo, Sewanee, Tennessee