• chapter one •
This very place is the Lotus Land, this very body, the Buddha.
—Hakuin Ekaku, Song of Zazen
A man writes a poem about boarding a ship to cross the Atlantic. It’s the twenty-first century, so the ship is entirely steel, the deck uniformly hums with machinery, and there is no creaking of rope and timber in sympathy and conversation with the roll of waves. A steel ship is stringently immune to life, yet a ladybug has accidentally stowed away in his cabin, tiny ambassador of all living things, trapped in a cold steel world. He makes what he can of a home for her in his all-steel desk of his all-steel cabin and brings her gifts of water and food.
However impossibly red her wings, and amazingly black her magic spots, still she dies soon in her all-steel world. The burial at sea that follows is in a matchbox—the sole remnant of living wood he could find on the ship.
Such insentient immunity to the sentience of all life is voluntary solitary confinement away from our human selves. “What is the true self?” asked Kodo Sawaki Roshi (1880–1965). “It’s brilliantly transparent like the deep blue sky, and there’s no gap between it and all living, bodily beings.”
Carnal
The immediate and visceral carnality of the red thread is evident in this very body—yours, mine. It leaves out nothing of blood, tears, umbilicus, birth, baby tending, sensuality, lust, the double helix of DNA, shit and piss reality. Could Zen be any kind of practice if it withdrew to a safe distance from embodied life?
Practice is a deep and ultimately wordless conversation between body and mind. Zazen allows the persistent “I” of the mind and the more humble “me” of the body to reattune, come into synch, and fall away together into the deeper knowing that is not-knowing. Discursive mind can be very persuasive, but the body has no need to offer anything but what it is; it is by nature unable to be anything other than genuine.
When mind and body are opposed to each other, this irreducible honesty of the body becomes part of the trouble. Traditionally, uneasy distaste for the troublesome body was evident from earliest days in organized Buddhism. A corpse—to be exact, the corpse of a young and once beautiful woman—now corrupt and oozing with worms and decay was long considered the obvious and perfect meditation subject sure to turn monks away in horror and mistrust from lust and life. But the red thread koan assures us no one can cut free, this side of death. And that even death is it! More deeply, it lets us see how the wise ones consciously embrace and embody this fact.
How can this be humbly and richly lived while not indulging the dream of a separate self? Where, except in the brief and unlikely marvel of a human body, can realization ever take place? And if what is realized at that moment is sometimes called our “great body,” a fullness of being that leaves nothing whatsoever out of it, what on earth is to be done with that?
This very body, uniquely yours or mine, able to suffer and bound to change and die, is our first and continuing point of intimate connection and free interchange with every other living being, and with the wholeness of the web of sentient life. It is the place and context of waking up. “All beings, by nature, are Buddha/As ice by nature is water. /Without water, there is no ice,” says Zen Master Hakuin (1686–1768) in his Song of Zazen. “Without beings, no Buddha.” The essential nature of all beings is seamless, empty, and complete, he is saying. Even clouded human beings—necessarily embodied as we are in mortal flesh and encumbered by self-consciousness—are at every point, and just as we are, fully resolvable back into original congruence with the nature of mind we call “Buddha,” meaning fully awake in reality. And that it is the matter of beingness itself that “creates” Buddha—or permits the marvel of waking up to be the necessary possibility for every human being.
We are born not only covered in blood, vernix, and amniotic fluid, expelled from the birth canal of another warm, mammalian body, but still connected to the still pulsing “red thread” of the umbilical cord. That will be cut—first signal of our singular identity—but leaving its permanent trace upon the body, the belly button, the point on the stem where our individuation commenced. What a curious whirlpool of flesh is birth, signifying at once that we appear, like all that is, ultimately from nothing, and yet the singular lucky chance of existence is handed to us down through vast time from living body to living body.
Our human consciousness, with its gradual skein or membrane of self-consciousness, discovers itself in a highly socialized animal body. Socialized by skin-to-skin touch and profound dependence on an immediate, caring other, it also discovers itself in certain gradual strictures placed on the body that accord to social life, beginning in control of the bladder and anal sphincter muscles . . . and on it goes, the long passage of fledging into socially human identity. But from another point of view, this animal body is the wise fool here to continually inform human consciousness that it is grounded at all times in “right here, right now”—the place where we are, on the earth, warm, breathing, subject to gravity, and entirely mortal.
Yeats saw this as the melancholy human tragedy of being “sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal.” This particular animal achieves extraordinary feats—mortality-defying pyramids, gravity-defying skyscrapers, space-denying Internet, Earth-denying space probes. But still the red thread cannot be cut. Even technologically extended, we remain creatures embodied at every point.
Mercifully. For the body belongs without apology to the universe and is the royal road back to full self-recognition. Only the mind resists admitting it is equally guilty as charged!
This Very Body
It is not just “the body” but this very body, the only one you will ever have, that is “the Buddha,” in Hakuin’s Song of Zazen. Waking up is the business of this very body, which belongs to the earth and the stars as much as everything else does. We wake together with the earth even as the earth wakes us, and when it wakes us we find the earth fully awake.
We meditate in a body that constantly makes it clear that because it is here in ever-changing circumstances, it will not always be here, nor always entirely comfortable. Bodies hurt, bodies are deeply joyful and full of sorrow, and bodies surely die; what gradually becomes clear is the fact that the rigor of practice—the agreement to be here willingly and to stay with that moment by moment by moment—is a loving act, provoked into being by these very facts.
On this planet at least it seems that only a being with a human body can experience loyalty to the inconceivable and let that ripen into waking up. Buddhahood is being-hood, conscious being-hood. Which is a consciousness shaped by being ignited on earth. So let’s take “This very body, the Buddha” as the human-shaped koan. There is nowhere to awaken but in this mortal bag of flesh and bone; therefore it is very good to take to heart what a miraculous business is this breathing body. And how mysterious, what it is, and does. Under the steady gaze of nonjudgmental awareness, this very body becomes very capacious and ceases to feel limited to the one who bears our name.
At the simplest level, it comes down to you. The whole of this comes down to you in your body. Your body is the original dharma gate and the very means by which you can be here. How did we ever become so commonplace about something like being here? Practice to a large extent is allowing the mystery of being here back into awareness at a properly haunting, informing, and transforming level.
The most ordinary everyday level is where the body is so generous and so helpful. It constantly provides us with this rounding earthy measure of bodily life. Bodily life on earth, birth through to death, is what conducts us through all the seasons and circumstances of waking up. Our birth and death are occurring throughout this life, even throughout a single day, being born into this moment, dying into that one.
Birth and death flow through this breathing body breath by breath. But so also does play and art and learning and sex and passions and love and tears and grief and illness and accidents—all the many miracles of being wash through this very body. No wonder this very body is the Buddha, vessel of awakening, and the one who wakes. And the dearest thing about having this very body is how it establishes indissoluble kinship with all beings and all kinds of beings, as well as trees, oceans, even puddles. There is a sense in which even a puddle is a kind of two- to three-day being, depending on local circumstances of weather . . .
So this very body is the locus of our sense of kinship, of our share in one great life, in which everything moves surely together—all of which rests in the fact of this very body being mortal, not long for this marvel of a world. Because we live in a mortal body subject to all the usual suffering of a sentient being, we share the red thread that connects all beings. All of us, saints and fools, equally attached to the red thread.
If we don’t understand that this very body is the Buddha, we become marooned in a spiritual vacuum dangerous to all life. To the extent that the Western spiritual tradition has been afraid to love the body, it has also been afraid of women, who bring such bodies into the world. And mortally afraid of death, because the body will die, taking me with it.
To the extent that a spiritual tradition seeks to find some way out of the death-bound body, a kind of death sentence is unconsciously placed not just on this life but on the living world itself. The world is seen as deathly and corrupted, despicable. A deep, rich, full-blooded engagement with the beautiful mutuality of all life is bypassed. We see how our civilization substitutes a great many things—and I do mean things—for intimate experience of life, which must include sickness, aging, and death. Which means refusing to accord with the terms of the earth, which so clearly assures us: “This is a place where everything breathes and moves together, and everything passes through.”
Practice takes breathing to heart for a very good reason; the breath rises and falls without clinging to anything, it teaches relinquishment breath by breath. By clinging to nothing it sustains life, while breath by breath accepting extinction. If you struggle to understand form and emptiness, the breath is patiently teaching it again and again right under our very noses!
This Very Body, the Buddha
When we say “body,” how far does that reach? Zen is slow, decidedly indolent in fact, to limit sentience to animate life forms. This is not just because streamlets, creeks, rivers, glaciers, rolling waves, hills, mountains, ranges, pebbles, boulders, and cliffs all impress on the mind with evident character, presence, and those vivid creative powers we call “impermanence.” It is not just because weeds, bushes, clumps, waves of grass, and most dramatically trees stand up strongly with their life and disclose the breath of the earth and the life of the soil with such ease. And it is not just because the ecological agreements or balance slowly forged between the participants in a given place becomes a shimmering web of relatedness that acts like a supervening intelligence, a kind of shared sentience actualized in the practiced genius of every detail of any ecosystem we can manage to discern. A “communion of subjects,” as Thomas Berry puts it, “not a collection of things” at all.
It is because the reciprocal fact is this (and Dogen put it about as well as anyone can): “I came to see that mind is no other than mountains, rivers and the great earth, the sun and the moon and the stars.”
His words have power to draw us toward the experience of a mutuality that has no outside to it. Even the briefest experience of this complete congruence, held out and honed by the mind of practice, is all but unspeakable—even while it can only sensibly be described as a state of brilliant sanity. To put it too soon or too much into words just divides it again.
And yet words themselves are part of the undivided nature of this reality. Just as much as the trill of a honey-eater, spoken words (it doesn’t matter what they say or who says them) are also who I am. The red thread of living emptiness runs through them too like fire, though the fact that words have “meaning” tends to capture and lock on to our attention with formidable power. An open response that comes close to touching “no me, no you”—even in the presence of abusive words coming from the other—knows the empty nature even of such words, and abuse has trouble finding lodging.
The apparent indirectness of Zen—its radical leaps, the natural stretching and troubling of the way the mind habitually likes to proceed—flows directly out of the enormous fact of the marvelously free and empty character of all that is so immediately apparent. Empty, and yet immediately conscripted by the mind into words and categories at least once removed from all that’s here, which is real, brief, and extraordinary—an inexhaustible mystery that addresses us most intimately and personally.
Mind
Dogen’s words point to what is sometimes capitalized as Mind—or consciousness as it discovers itself when the strictures of separate mind and body fall away from us. When we see clearly, there is nothing at all that can be separated out, taken apart, or opposed. In Case 5 of The Blue Cliff Record, Master Xuefeng (822–908) says, “When I pick it up this earth is like a grain of rice in size.” Have a look—a grain of rice is the size of the earth—indeed, of the universe—in implication. To pick up something is to embody the whole earth; there’s no choice in that matter. Even to think of the earth is to pick it up entirely. All this is the nature the great dream consciousness shares with the earth.
And that it is the universe that shapes this consciousness is an understanding that can be tracked to its resounding conclusion. We have a universe-shaped mind, or as Thomas Aquinas put it, we are “universe capable.” When it becomes not a discursive path of fact but indelible experience in this very body-mind that Mind is Universe—that’s Dogen’s “the dropped-away body and mind.” Not dropped away as in transcended. Dropped away as in realized as edgeless, timeless, seamless, unending.
More humbly, just to breathe, to stand on the earth, to walk on it, to pick up its steady mutual conversation through feet and skin, to slide into it bodily in any body of water, to let any supposed boundary between earth-body and this-body grow more sweetly misplaced, to allow the full sense of “all beings, one body” to slip in unawares when the guard of thought is briefly off duty—all are intimations of Dogen’s dropping free from the insular self. This is the red thread that cannot be cut, the ever-present simple welcome back to where we all are. One body, home itself.
This very body that sits down and walks about also has its own ecology, hosting innumerable organisms throughout the body and all over its surface—a very striking way of understanding Daowu’s words, “All over the body are hands and eyes,” or Yunyan’s “Throughout the body, hands and eyes.” If you doubt me, examine some magnifications of the specialized mites, gut flora, bacteria, and parasites that occupy every niche of the terra infirma of this very body. Ridley Scott’s Alien begins to look harmlessly derivative!
But consciousness participates in its own microecologies in every breath-moment. The breath itself is spirit of mutual exchange with where we find ourselves: We breathe in the world and breathe out our “selves.” But the skin, too, drinks in the world: this tiny movement of the air, the swirl and caress of water, that small pocket of cool under a tree. Eyes, ears, nose, and tongue enter the continual “communion of subjects,” the living current of relatedness, that relieves us forever from the tedium of being part of any “collection of things.”
The local sense of “one body” emerges, too, with any glimpse of the intimate weave of innumerable relationships composing even the tiniest ecological system, a rock pool for instance. For that matter, a human family and its entire tissue of genetic and emotional relationships, extending far back in ancestral time, implicitly helps form any human individual. That person—you, me—is a singular visible focal point in a fluid network of relational impulses (“your life is also my life”), passing to and fro in constant interchange of creative energy, both more and less consciously between family members through generations.
In the manner of a fractal, the pre-Buddhist image of the Diamond Net of Indra describes the whole revealed in every detail that composes it: Every knot in the net is a jewel, every jewel is a being or form existing throughout not just space but time, and every facet of every jewel mirrors every other jewel in the infinite net. I don’t recall anyone ever commenting on the color of the thread tying each knot and radiating out to link every jewel, but clearly, it is red.
Ecological awareness discloses not only that the whole comes along with each detail, but also that there is nothing static here: Everything moves together; the Net of Indra is a whole perpetually unfolding in time. Every “jewel”—being, form—is a dynamic entity, embodying time. “Time,” as poet Wislawa Szymborska advises:
retains
its sacred right to meddle
in each earthly affair.
Looking even more deeply, there is no body that is not time.
Sojourning Here
Jack Kerouac created a kind of accidental koan when he wondered, “Night and Day: why do they sojourn here?” Every body comes to pose this question, when it aches, collapses with pain, winces from the sharpness of becoming old, just as every body scintillates with the pleasure of water’s touch, sexual release, the beautiful loss of self in dancing, laughter, stillness. Bodies sojourn here in night and day, even while they hang out in eternity.
The why of this question, “Night and Day: why do they sojourn here?” is the mainspring, making “the obvious” into a question and releasing us into the fact of night and day, itself a great mystery. Night and day. An account of how there comes to be night and day will describe the rotation of the planet as it spins around the sun—but that has no purchase here. This Why? lets us into the wonder of sojourning here together with night and day. Which is one unbroken, endless cycle. We have only a limited number of days and nights, but the cycle itself is all but endless. How can we really be separate from that?
Day and night, the fact of day “ending” and becoming night that “ends,” becoming day, provokes a sense of story. A journey from night to day or day to night, or one day to the next is a story shape—beginning and end and something in between—that birth and death apparently confirms, creating a very strong shaping to our human kind of consciousness. Karmic consciousness—the world of cause and effect.
In a way you could say the simplest version of what a “story” may be is this one: Tick-Tock. Tick opens a space that is resolved by Tock. Is this little tick-tock the tiniest yet most compelling story of all, time its very motor? Yet tick-tock is actually a recent human story; until a few centuries ago most people lived free of its clutches.
Tick-tock time has measurable power and authority. Once upon a time a child in Australia could stand in a red-painted public telephone box (keeping the door ajar with one foot to ease the stink of old cigarette smoke) and dial the free number for the time. Out of the heavy Bakelite receiver would come the sounds of a plummy BBC male voice: “On the third stroke, it will be 8:18 precisely. Beep, beep, beep. On the third stroke, it will be 8:18 and fifteen seconds. Beep, beep, beep . . .” So solid, adult, and irrefutable, and no need to pay for the call! You could even say any rude thing you liked to this impregnably British form of authority and get away with it completely—anything!
And suddenly you realize that all along this mysterious character was simply making the time up as he went. That in reality, a sense of being change itself could slide over your skin in ten thousand different ways, and not one of them answerable to unimpeachable BBC authority. When did we all agree to place ourselves between those little iron teeth of tick-tock and let it begin to chew our lives? Before tick-tock, there was day and night, sunrises and sunsets, the procession of seasons to sojourn with—rounded and productive in time like the earth, and edgeless in its rhythm. Where does the turning of the earth begin or end? Cyclical time tells a never-ending story of one thing becoming another—not life ticking away as an eternal deficit account, life in increasingly bitter quarrel with time. Night and day sojourn here as us.
If there were no creative tilt to the earth’s axis, the fascinating world of change, equal parts enlivening, enduring, and restorative, would be more bland, and even more likely to escape the attention of human eyes locked on to clocks.
In the great body of our life, everything moves together, and everything is passing through, rocks more slowly than us, butterflies more quickly. But rates of change are not the significant matter. The significant matter is that we all sojourn entirely together in change itself. We may resent sojourning here as time, noticing its plans to remove from us all that we love and unpick our cherished constructs of ourselves—the fragile and amazing production of time I call “myself,” tricked up from nothing. Do we cower in a kind of shame, in the implacable face of impermanence? Is the mechanism of time, the invention of human tick-tock time, an attempt to wrestle death and impermanence into some more manageable order, ostensibly at arm’s length from our mortal selves?
Original Face
But then there’s the matter taken up by the koan that asks of this very body: What is your original face, before even your parents were born? An intimate and piercing question about identity and true presence in the face of perishability. If you resist its offer of intimacy and eternity right here in every detail of being so briefly here, you might go down a garden path of thoughts about lineage, the human genome and evolution . . . And yet—not just time but all time up to now is intrinsically what we and every particle of matter brings forth—the entire universe story. Which makes us very rich in time indeed—or if you prefer, rich in impermanence.
What is the original face of you not just before conception but before even the universe was born? And can it possibly be separated from exactly right here now. “Original” draws us into the darkness of origin, beyond the limit of what you can do with a knowing mind. What is your true face? Can you bring it forth now? Your personal and timeless original face is not limited by sojourning with night and day, or by abiding only now, in timelessness.
All things under the law of change appear to be all there is of time, and all of time is present in every single thing. Impermanence has no outside. The second-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (c150–c250) proposed that if no permanence can be found anywhere in this universe, which is nothing but impermanence, then actually there can be no impermanence either. Impermanence can exist only by reference to that which is permanent, which turns out to be nowhere to be found. So impermanence itself is unbounded, all there is, eternal.
Zen Master Dogen brings it home even more personally, saying we ourselves are time and are inseparable from all that is, which is also time. A tree is time. Mountains are time. A crackling twig in the flames is time. He calls this nature of things “being time,” saying, “There is nothing in time. Everything is time. Each thing is observably time . . . The time we call spring blossoms directly as an existence called flowers. The flowers in turn express the time called spring. This is not existence within time. Existence itself is time.” He goes on to say of this limitless well of being-time: “Spring with all its numerous blossoms is called flowing. When spring flows there is nothing outside of spring.”
We are just the burning, the fire of this life and death at every moment. Life is not followed by death. Life and death are one fire. In each moment, the moment before goes dark behind us. Death is not some moment still to come but keenly present in the breath just being completed. Every single body on the earth lives time fully this way. Every heartbeat knows nothing outside eternity.
Here is what Victor Frankl recounted of a meeting with a young woman in a Nazi death camp. The woman knew she was soon to die. She knew exactly what the death camp was. She was under no illusions and yet was curiously joyful. He talked with her and this is what she said: “I’m grateful fate has hit me so hard. In my former life I was spoiled and I didn’t take spiritual matters seriously.” She pointed through the clouded window of the hut to a chestnut tree, where you could just make out two blossoms on one branch. “I often talk to this tree,” she told him. Frankl was startled and didn’t know how to take these words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxious for her, he asked, “Does the tree reply?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And what does it say to you?” he asked.
She told him, “It says to me: I am here. I am here. I am life. Eternal life.”
Mind Is Skin, Flesh, and Bones
To think just in terms of a whole composed of parts in separation is duly to discover your self within a world of separation. As a thought or something read about, no-separation is just another idea, however vast its intellectual consequences. But to discover no-separation as experience is to taste being profoundly clear and free within unbounded reality—a realization that can later be meticulously examined and further clarified.
To sense one body of reality in this very body, to see directly that everything moves together, to know for yourself there is no other, no self separate from anything at all—when this happens the ordinary calculus of mind abruptly and comprehensively gives way, leaving you staring onto unmediated reality, whole and complete.
What comes along with some totally “ordinary” thing—the sudden sound of timber dropped in a courtyard, a human sneeze in the smoky dark, crow call over a lake, crushed beer can picked up on a beach, the way the floor exactly meets the wall, or just the act of rolling over half submerged in sleep—is an edgeless completeness impossible to fully encompass in word or thought. The experience lights up in the delight of no-thought, alive in a human body.
Dogen, again, on this embodied Mind: “Mind is skin, flesh, bones, and marrow. Mind is taking up a flower and smiling. There is having mind and having no mind . . . Blue, yellow, red, and white are mind. Long, short, square, and round are mind. The coming and going of birth and death are mind. Year, month, day, and hour are mind. Dream, phantom, and empty flower are mind. Water, foam, splash, and flame are mind. Spring flowers and autumn moon are mind. All things that arise and fall away are mind.”
It is impossible to overstate how remote this utterly receptive mind is from the usual state in which we look out from some “inside” and notice and identify this and that, this discerned as not that. We are entrained into founding “reality” in differences, and assigning words to the task of maintaining these differences, carving out things and ourselves, beginning in the word “I.”
Dogen reminds us of the injury this does: “When the self advances to confirm the ten thousand things, that is delusion. When the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self, that is realization.” Confirming our separation in the very act of confirming “things,” we pass entirely by the way their marvelously open, complete, and empty nature is in fact constantly confirming our own. Body and mind dropping back into the seamless unfolding, dirt under our toenails, blood thumping in our ears, we are home.
Wise Fool
So the red thread and this wise fool of a body are intimates. The body’s powers of self-healing and self-regulating make much of our so-called wisdom look effete and foolish. At every moment and in every circumstance—sitting, walking or lying down, giving birth, making love, or dying, laughing, or weeping—how wonderfully well we are always using it, this great empty body of reality from which no body can be carved out (even while minds can dream of separateness with consummate ease).
A body is complete as a pebble is complete, or a waterfall. “Knowing” less, it never stops responding. The socialized self soon learns to shrink from contact with piss, shit, vomit, snot, blood, sweat, and semen, from every issue of the body except tears, the physical signal of emotional connection, its finest expression—compassion. Meanwhile, this wise fool of body, knowing less than any of this, carries itself with the completeness of self-nature through every one of its expressive signs and stations of life.
Pregnant, the mammalian body is the very koan of intimacy or non-duality, vividly embodying and resolving the question that realization confirms: “Is this one? Is this two?” I won’t say.
The miracle of human gestation, birth, and lactation fully embodies the mystery of not-two, and even less than one, as well as the mystery of compassion, as blood becomes milk, by way of a sweat gland specialized to the purpose. The depth of affinity and mutuality actualized here is dramatic, incontestable, and difficult to bypass. And yet—Buddhism has vigorously conformed to the strong desire of all the other great patriarchal religious traditions in its swift desire to do exactly that.
In Case 80 of The Blue Cliff Record, the very old Master Zhaozhou (778–897) was asked by a monk, “Does a newborn baby have the sixth sense [that is, full and complete consciousness] or not?” We can wonder in passing whether consciousness, any more than a potato, or perhaps a willow waving in a light breeze, can possibly “have” any number at all. But Zhaozhou kindly passes over that, seeing that the monk is probably not interested in babies but asking whether or not Zhaozhou can confirm him to be freshly alive and cognizant, after dropping away body and mind. In other words, “How do you see me?”
“Throwing a ball on the swift current,” Zhaozhou replies. The monk’s question itself skids and swirls onto the swift flow of change, as does the monk, and so it arrives back into his own hands. Yet meanwhile, though Zhaozhou is tossing to the monk part of a traditional Zen capping phrase, what an evocation of the marvelous sudden fact of newly arrived human life! From the mystery of another body, that itself came out of mystery, life is here, consciousness is here, thrown at every moment into reality and spinning like a ball on the swift, immortal current of being here.
The monk, possibly still fumbling in his head for the “sixth consciousness,” takes this back to his teacher, Touzi (1032–1083). “What does ‘throwing a ball on the swift current’ mean?” he asks.
“Moment by moment, it never stops flowing,” is the kindly, even reverent, but also cutting response.
All our attempts to capture it and tie it down, consciousness itself, “never stops flowing.” Nothing can. The flow can no more be stopped than the red thread can be cut.
Where Can I Put My Entire Body?
There is a line in a verse attached to one of the cases in the Wumen-kuan that asks, “Where can I put my entire body?” Well, at night when you are very tired, you know what to do with it and with complete expertise: You can lie down, you can rest it entirely, and what a beautiful thing that is. Stepping into the shower, then you know so finely where to put your entire body: right in the luxurious stream of warm water.
But this “my entire body” is actually pointing to something deeper. What galaxy can you find that is left out of your entire body? And where can you put that? Where can anything be “put,” when there is nothing outside of it? The fact itself takes care of everything. There is nothing to put anywhere.
Unborn
The mind of “This very body the Buddha” is mind in its most expansive, shared, interpenetrating, and interconnected sense—mind that pervades the whole universe, as in “Buddha nature pervades the whole universe existing right here now . . . in this very body the Buddha.”
This very personal body is equally the Unborn, as Zen Master Bankei (1622–1693) termed “original mind,” saying: “It was not born with this body, it does not die with its extinction, it is not male, it is not female, it is not good or bad. It is beyond all comparisons and thus we call it Buddha Nature, that which lies beyond all limitations, dividedness, comparison.”
Identity, fragility, mortality, and the unborn, the undivided—no one can keep them apart! Meanwhile our bones safely do know how to die, or to put it slightly differently, how to remain in loyal and complete agreement with the terms of the earth.
But bodies can be socially decisive matters—dictating exclusion and inclusion, domination and subordination. Female bodies, just the fact of them, scandalize all jealously guarded forms of male privilege. Bodies are apt to be socially embarrassing and widely held to be natural antagonists to the spiritual reach of human existence.
To this, Yunmen presents the lightning flash of “Dried shit stick!” when a monk asks him, perhaps innocently, “What is Buddha?” To this, a woman overflowing with the joy of waking up asks Hakuin, doesn’t he realize the great light radiates even in the contents of the latrine? There are few religious traditions that so vigorously see nothing to reject even in the fact of bodily waste. Bodhidharma’s “Vast emptiness, nothing holy” encompasses the holy fact of nothing rejected, everything included, in the light of emptiness.
Absent the mind of “this very body the Buddha,” the religious force of ecological mind is dangerously easy to miss—or in fact, speedily bypass—and the reality of this vast communion of subjects where we find ourselves, equal in all directions, one shared body of life, can find no lodging.
So “Where can I put my complete body?” Master Wumen (1183–1260) asks us. Putting completeness “somewhere” is as impossible as severing the red thread.
And so we bow to this body, undulating with the deepest currents of being, entirely vulnerable, at one with the earth in every breath, never outside the mystery, always inviting us in.