Mountain Lamp Community
Embraced and Embracing
Season of White Hemlocks, 2004
I think the response to 'practice more' in the face of the world's current problems is a strong, appropriate and compassionate one and can be, and often is, helpful. However, 'more practice' will not eradicate sickness, old age, and death nor should it. Dogen, in his text titled Shoji (Birth and Death), wrote "for a person to seek Buddha apart from birth and death would be like pointing a cart's shaft northward when you wanted to go south, or like facing south to see the northern skies." Just understand, he says, "that birth and death itself is nirvana, and you will neither hate one as being birth and death, nor cherish the other as being nirvana. Only then can you be free of birth and death." You will be free, but still you will die. You will be free, but there still will be 'being born.' It is not by evading our conditions that we will find relief, rest and freedom. It is only by embracing, and being embraced that we realize freedom. It is not by having theological or philosophical overviews of exceeding intelligence that we will find liberation, but it is by entering and allowing the pain, the suffering and the despair with open hands and with open hearts and with open eyes. However, beware! We need not tell stories to ourselves about our unique conditions thus supporting the myopic self narrative. It is not by psychologizing or analyzing. It is by embracing and being embraced. An ancient one said it this way, "inside a mass of white clouds one sees no white clouds, inside the sound of flowing water one hears no flowing water."
Someone said to me the other morning, "I feel terrible and wonderful." This is a mature emotional response to our lives and the situation we find in our present day world. In this way, we are holding and containing both sides. We are tolerating and living within the tensions of seeming opposites. Of course, we often prefer to choose and lean to the one side. If we are depressives, we want to lean into the black side of things for this supports our narrative or story of the world. This leaning supports, while again habitually constructing, our unique experiencing of the world. Others might choose to lean into the wonderful side of things thus supporting their story. However, our practice is to take the seat right in the center-in the center of our bodies, in the center of our hearts and in the center of the world. This is the axis mundi. This is why when we first sit down on the black cushion, we rock slightly to the left and then to the right in an ever decreasing arc until we are settled on the middle of the cushion right under the center place of the bodhi tree. We then take one or two deep breaths - letting everything in and then letting everything go. We relax, sitting upright into the middle of our own lives and into the middle of the world's unfolding life. Poised yet utterly relaxed. This is the core place of practice, the place of the heart. This is also the residence of courage. So we sit here allowing what arises and then allowing what falls away, allowing each thing in and then allowing each thing to drop away.
By sitting in the middle, we are both tender and fierce. And this is an attitude, a posture, we can use in our sitting and in the rest of our lives - a tender fierceness or a fierce tenderness. This allows us to hold both sides as we settle in more closely, as we move closer and closer to the truth of no picking and no choosing. This is not, however, a practice of passivity, dullness or blankness. It is actually quite the opposite. It is a practice of dynamic engagement in whatever presents itself. It is a total engagement in whatever arises…not picking and choosing but engaged and participatory! The question is never one of whether to commit or not, but one of how to participate most fully. The question is never why do others suffer or why do I suffer, but the question is how do I live fully within the world's suffering with hands and eyes wide open. Dogen writes in a piece entitled Mitsugo or Secret Words that "the Buddhas and ancestors embrace everything; likewise you embrace everything; I embrace everything. Practice includes all. Generations include all. And intimacy includes all." This is our field of practice. This is the way of practice - embracing and embraced.
In the experience called no picking and choosing, all dualities fall away. Victim and victimizer fall away. Crime and merit, good and bad, before and after are all wiped away. There is no longer wonderful and terrible. Whatever arises is simply it to the very bottom. It is embraced and embracing at the same moment.