• epilogue •
True attention is rare, and totally sacrificial.
—Flora Courtois
Benefit what cannot be benefited; do what cannot be done.
—Zen Master Mazu
A recent cartoon showed a man in a torn and threadbare suit enthusiastically explaining to his three small children huddled over an open fire in a cave, “Yes the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders!!”
The entire direction of an extractive “growth economy” is to gear ever-rising population levels to ever-rising levels of wealth extraction from the limited resources of the earth—and also vice versa—regardless of the logical impossibility of the very proposition.
Add to this the fact that Western modernity is the proposition that the things of humanity stand proudly alone, apart and against the flow, demanding a rightful admiration, that human lifestyle is rightfully wrested from the earth and aggressively proclaims its independence from the web of life, which is viewed as an impediment, a mere backdrop to defiant self-expression, or a shameful failure to impose the will more completely.
A “modernized” economy is one in vigorous retreat from the old humiliation of bowing to the actual, physical terms and nature of the earth—witness the exploding economies of China, India, Brazil, parts of Africa, which together with the indolent sense of self-entitlement of the rich nations is sacrificing the future coherence of the biome of the earth on which all life actually depends. All the while ignoring the crushing poverty of the majority of human beings, and all on behalf of a brief burst of great affluence possible for a relatively small minority of people.
Now add to that the comprehensive attention-deficit disorder known as the digital revolution, which further severs its heavy users from that real feedback loop known as solid reality (mere “analogue”), replacing evidence with ungrounded opinion and interconnectedness with physically isolating “connectivity.”
Both the long-term pull of modernity away from what is “natural” and the sudden sharp turn toward on-screen attention pulling us away from what is physically happening to life on earth are the very antithesis to deep human intimacy with life-and-death reality here on earth.
Against this, the red thread of our actual human reality, richly tangled with boundless emptiness, is all that humanity is hanging by now, and all that we have ever been hanging by—which may leave our situation looking dangerously vulnerable. Yet this is the tenacious reality, of life and death and productive vulnerability itself, inseparable from the whole of an infinitely interconnected reality. The tenacity of the red thread is the power of human wisdom and compassion grounded in the reality of human being. It connects the one who is awake to it with the naturalness of direct action in response.
We do hang as a species by the red thread; we would have to destroy ourselves completely to destroy the red thread; but the red thread remains forever, by its very nature, our deepest and most enduring human source of creativity, renewability, and rich unfolding. Mind congruent with reality: that is our sole and also open and unbounded means “to save the many beings.”
The Actual Body
The teisho of the actual body is one lifelong human bow to the fullness of reality. In a sense, although the tradition of a practice like Zen points the Way, we all make the Way our own in making our bow to life and earth. And it follows as one continuous matter that in bowing to life, we bow to mortality.
The creative power of response at any moment in a life comes from knowing we’re not here long and not alone. The actual body is where acknowledgment of this limited life exactly meets (like two arrows meeting in midair, point to point) the radiant fact of unlimited, undivided reality, in which every detail, each particle of matter, expresses and participates entirely in the whole. This self-enclosed human mind extends to Mind, awakens and participates in it. Expressing Mind in the way you live every “ordinary” moment on this unlikely planet—there’s the joy of it, becoming like this.
Actualizing this participation—drawing it deeper into life and up into keener understanding—all the fun lies here. An old Hasid called it walking the sharpest blade, adding, “On either side, a netherworld.”
It has always been a startling time to be alive on earth. But this one seems qualitatively different. We’re rightly terrified and mortified but also fortunate to be here at such a critical time, when earth lies bleeding—the central fact that now underpins everything else. Can we rely on the fact that attending well and seeing clearly we will know what to do as decisive moments arise for each of us? There are thousands of such moments large and small, and the choices we make ripple into the entire world in this great, distributed field in which human beings are making the human world, that is now beginning to impact the unfolding geophysics of the earth herself. No one knows how far we can rely upon ourselves. But we do begin to know this crisis of the whole earth will be the making or unmaking of us as a species and as an earthly experiment in sentience.
What might response to the call of the moment upon a human being look like? When Shakyamuni Buddha was walking one time with his disciple Sakadevendra he pointed to the place ahead and said, “This would be a good place for the temple to be erected.” Sakadevendra bent down, plucked a blade of grass, planted it in the earth in front of the Buddha and said, “The temple is erected!”
There’s much to see here. The immediacy and spontaneity of practiced attention. The creativity that springs from frugal means (abundantly on offer). That practice is right where you are, not vested in some special place and moment. That a single blade of grass planted into the earth creates a temple. And that the playful act of recognizing and bending down, plucking, planting, speaking those words—of consecrating the fact with complete human attention and expressiveness—there it is, at every point, the temple erected. One body, actualized in human terms. This very body (Ananda, you, me, and the whole of reality) is articulated in such complete and spontaneous response.
The deeply mysterious words of Dogen that comment upon the tenth Grave Precept of Zen, sometimes translated as “Not defaming the three treasures (of awakening, the teaching, and each other)” begins, “The teisho of the actual body is the harbor and the weir, where human eyes gather.”
Dogen’s words are comment on the final and summative tenth Grave Precept: to take up the way of not defaming the three treasures. “Not defaming” means not failing to hold yourself toward “the three treasures” of “Buddha” (your own unimpeachable awake and original nature), “dharma” (the deep way of the universe, the teaching, and each thing in itself, all finding themselves revealed in each other), and “sangha” (all of us, deeply interwoven, here on earth). Does this begin to sketch the nature of what Dogen calls “the actual body”?
Here are the words in full: The Teisho of the actual body is the harbor and the weir, where human eyes gather. This is the most important thing in the world. Its virtue finds its home in the ocean of essential nature. It is beyond explanation. We just accept it with respect and gratitude.
What then is the “teisho”—song or shout or deep echo in a human being—of the actual body? The “actual body” is highly particular in every instance, yet found in everything; and is nothing at all until it is actualized by us, brought to life. Any vivid expression of this actual body affords shelter and sustaining power . . . a safe harbor, a steadily brimming weir. “Where human eyes gather” (a phrase sometimes not brought across from the original) suggests the timeless gathering of wakeful beings. Why is it that “human eyes”—suggesting not just the brilliant eye of realization but also the simple effort to pay attention and offer care—gather at such a point, creating safe harbor, a state brimming and yielding as at the spillway of a weir?
When we restore the phrase where human eyes gather, our embodied, human, red thread entanglement with emptiness is restored to Dogen’s powerful words. Restored, the temple is erected. The red thread that cannot be cut makes our very humanity the live connection to all that is and brings us sharply to awareness; when we admit our vast connectedness, we enter all the joy and grief that comes with that. We come to realization just as we are—messy, failing, laughing, loving, and torn. And since we cannot cut free or carve out this self from the powerful mix of passionate feeling and natural obligation revealed as the red thread, we learn to let that self go, instead, complete, into what cannot be cut.
The mixed and hazy nature of being human includes the sharp inevitability of knowing we’ll part with everything we love; this conscious fact may be the final and keenest making of us fully human. But it is perfect for purpose. A leaf meets its stem precisely in the mysterious place that’s perfect for the letting go and dropping away; likewise, the notch of death, and of giving ourselves away, in all of us.
Dogen goes on to say, of this teisho of the actual body, which forms a harbor and weir where human eyes gather: “Its virtue finds its home in the ocean of essential nature.” Which is to say that this expression of the actual body finds its source and natural home in undivided emptiness—or “ocean of essential nature.” “This is the most important thing in the world,” he tells us. “It is beyond explanation. We just accept it with respect and gratitude.”
Its sole “explanation” is the way it lives us and finds us out, as we feel our way home to ourselves in the dark along the guiding wall of “I don’t know.” Or as Samuel Beckett put it, “Dear Incomprehension—thanks to you I’ll be myself in the end.” This self is beyond “comprehension,” but you can confirm it entirely for yourself, in that open state of “not-knowing.”
Properly Looking After It
Dongshan was unwell. A monk came and asked him, “Your Reverence is sick—after all is there someone who is not sick?”
Dongshan said, “There is.” And he was not being asked, nor was he replying, about someone other than himself.
The monk then asked, “Does the one who is not sick look after Your Reverence?”
Dongshan said, “This old monk is properly looking after that one.”
“How is it when Your Reverence is looking after that one?” asked the monk.
And Dongshan replied, “Then I do not see that there is any sickness at all.”
No sickness at all. His words anticipate Yunmen’s great offer: Medicine and sickness heal each other. The whole earth is medicine. What is this self? What sickness is Yunmen talking about? He’s pointing us to something infinitely deeper than the way in which the existence of medicine implies sickness, or that sickness discloses healing and what wholeness may be. All the way to the undivided, where nothing is opposed or can bump into anything else. At that level, the singular power of the wholeness of the earth, the fact of the wholeness of reality, to heal the wound of existence, begins to dawn. And in sensing that and bringing it to life, we see ourselves at last—not as a one-off event but as an ongoing mystery, rippling into being, moment by moment, together with everything else . . . For if the whole earth is one state of ever-transforming potency, Yunmen demands, then “What is this self?”
In the case of Dongshan, unwell, is “this self” (in the light of Yunmen’s question) the one who is so clearly lying there, sick? Is it the one who he tells the monk is not sick? Or is it the one who he insists is properly looking after that one? Can there be even a jot of difference between these “three”? When Mazu was lying, deeply unwell, in Case 3 of The Blue Cliff Record, it’s the accountant monk who comes along to check on this very mystery, asking Mazu, “How is Your Reverence feeling these days?” “Sun Face Buddha, Moon Face Buddha” is the master’s reply.
Sun Face Buddha is the one said to live for eight hundred golden years; such time cannot “run out” but stretches lazily to meet the eternity of a dragon-fly delicately poised in the air to sip from the flowing stream. Moon Face Buddha is the one born in the morning who dies by evening, like the brevity of dew, butterfly, breath; thus every breath counts, every grimace of pain is piercing to the one who loves you, mortality quickens your heartbeat and rouses you to meet today.
In Mazu’s labor of mortal illness, which is which? When these “two” are not two, does being have any time, indeed any sickness, at all?
These two “faces”—both boundless and momentary at once—of our peculiarly human consciousness are constantly being encountered and fully or partly resolved in sensations, feelings, thoughts, insights, imagination, stories, conversations, dreams—in meeting every action arising in mind. They are both present when under the sharp pressure of sickness, too, as Mazu makes clear, as well as in those balmy years, days, moments of nothing yet especially going wrong. At every point, which is which? Realized “Buddha” facing imminent mortality; dying human being who is radiantly unborn. They heal completely into each other, in just this fully aware cough, splutter, collapse of strength, wave of grief, guttural breathing, and underneath it all, this shock of unaccountable joy . . .
So even in the throes of demanding illness—or debilitating rage, bout of terror—there is someone, closer even than yourself, who is not sick, not enraged, not lost in fear. Each time we actively touch what heals the gap between medicine and sickness, and realize the whole earth, wholeness of reality, as that no-gap, then we live a little more deeply into becoming the full response to Yunmen’s question, “What is this self?” Right here is the beginning of seeing into Dongshan’s humble statement: “This old monk is properly looking after that one.”
Does practice and realization “help”? That’s the monk’s unspoken question. Dongshan says, instead, “I help it by practicing.” There’s the teisho of the actual body. Something gets past us and touches what’s been free and whole from the very beginning. We recognize ourselves a little, at last, and start to bring that forward to meet the day. Human eyes gather in the wake of such healing touch. Practice becomes extending this mind to all beings, the whole world, and to this ailing, clouded, yet transparent self that embraces all beings.
So practice—“properly looking after that one”—is our human harbor within the “ocean of essential nature.” Its virtue—strength, worth—lies in recognizing our true home in the place that is empty of “me.” Properly looking after that true self means life lived consciously as the vow to find the open response in even the most pressed of circumstances.
“What’s it like then?” the monk is asking. What’s that like in the midst of suffering, sickness, loss? “Then I do not see that there is any sickness at all.”
This is a genuine finding, a practical matter, not solace, nor an invocation of something that may be ardently desired yet held in secret fear at arm’s length. Sun Face Buddha and Moon Face Buddha are always healing into each other and closing the wound of existence. What echoes in me when I write this is the call of an unnamed East Timorese poet who was listed among the dead or missing, after the Indonesian military assault upon the population in the wake of the referendum that chose independence from Indonesia in 1999. His last message was read out to us all at a protest rally in Sydney:
Be here
Be immortal
John Tarrant’s translation of the fifth mode (arriving in concurrence within the relative and absolute) in Dongshan’s magisterial series of verses known as the Five Ranks, sets out the nature of possessing no rank at all this way:
Not deciding “it is” or “it isn’t,”
Do you have the courage to be at peace with it?
Everyone wants to leave the endless changes.
But when we finish bending and fitting our lives,
We come and sit by the fire.
“Bending and fitting our lives”—that’s the endless contriving of escape attempts—moving off from circumstances, making ourselves up a little “better,” warding off or contorting ourselves to disown what hurts, doing what we usually describe as coping with things, bumpily adjusting to what never will stand still as required.
“Sitting by the fire” is very different. Sometimes it’s translated as “the charcoal fire”; we’re all smudged with it. Sitting by such a fire is certainly not sitting on your hands but is the work and play of forbearance, close attention to what actually is, curiosity and inquiry, discovery and response, and making a home in the unknown—which means facing directly toward the inexhaustible fire. “Then I do not know that there is any sickness at all.” There it is, the fire.
The sense of ease and “doing nothing” in this profound process touches Mazu’s challenge: “Benefit what cannot be benefitted; do what cannot be done.” When the evening washup is done and one last warm plate placed to dry in the rack, in the nameless satisfaction of completion, who actually did that? Who strokes the brow of the child you love even more than your own life, when he is feverish? Who feels the beautiful shock of your lover’s skin touching yours, who does that? We rejoin the ongoing benefit going on in the place where we are—just in becoming it, and shrinking from no part of it. Dongshan’s remark, “It is only for your benefit!” cuts dangerously deep. There’s no end to benefitting the benefit, relinquishing the crowded sense of self, and breathing a little more completely, doing what cannot be “done.” A little like never being able to single out (though you search to the end of time) Zhaozhou’s one fact for which you are responsible.
The deep lament that rejoins us to the pain of the world begins to realize the benefit of ceasing to stand apart. But it cuts deeper: The whole of this must be realized as benefit, not excluding the pain and cries of all sentient beings. The whole world is medicine: realizing that wholeness is the ongoing healing process. Just try taking “benefit” out of that!
So the benefit, the ongoing provenance, is embracing what is, shorn of the distorting fuzz of opinions about it, and the fear they so carefully mask. In the undertaking “I am always looking after that one,” can you hear the sacrifice of self that brings the walls in the mind tumbling down, leaving little or nothing to fear? With nothing to fear, there is just one great “equals” sign: “Then I do not see that there is any sickness—or fault or failing or finality—at all.” Being here, and undivided, touches being immortal.
A hundred-year-old and very deaf but loving Korean nun made the undivided offer to an Australian Zen nun, Chi Kwang, when, unable to hear anything much of what Chi Kwang was trying to say to her, just brushed all such bother aside and said, “Let’s get enlightened together!”
I find that a fine presentation of the human teisho of the actual body of reality. The trees don’t seem to need teisho: They just offer it as themselves. Pebbles, likewise, and they do so completely. Potatoes, too, even cracked coffee mugs and the silvery ting of the teaspoon sounding the china. But humans seem to need to repeatedly stumble on it all over again in order to tumble more fully to ourselves. That beautiful daily struggle that seems particular or peculiar to the human shape that emptiness takes. We cannot “achieve” or “attain” what is already our true nature; we practice to achieve and refine taking part in the earth and all of life more consciously, more here. No one is enlightened alone, even if there is no one else about.
And as Flora Courtois put it, we don’t get enlightened at all, we simply enlighten each moment with true attention. True attention, she said, is “rare, and totally sacrificial.” The open response requires throwing away “everything that we have been or hope to be, to face each moment naked of identity, open to whatever comes, and bereft of guideposts.” Guideposts would simply reinstate a self setting out on the track of getting something good, good for the self. But “It’s better to have nothing than something good,” as Linji kindly assures us.
Yet don’t mistake this fiercely playful embrace of full reality for austerity. Consider Keizan’s confirming verse to the case in which the master Tongan Daopi said, when asked what it is that he loves, “I have already become like this”:
The moon of mind, the flower of eyes,
Are bright and beautiful.
Opening since time beyond kalpas—
Who will play with them?
Listen to the inviting song of the actual body! Emptiness plays in “Moon of mind,” eternity plays in “Opening since time beyond kalpas.” Actualizing turns up in “Flower of eyes,” and even more in the joy of the wide-open offer, “Who will play with them?” Intimacy is most simply the whole of life and actual body, wherein there are no parts any longer to be found. Who is this self then?
This who—is not a thing. It’s just intimacy, most natural, the mystery that will never be cleared up, will always lie open—the source called I don’t know—and so is ever open to coming more clear. Where do you see it? There’s nowhere you cannot. Just take a few scattered crumbs, sparrows hopping, their shadows never missing a single beat—and include the many years it takes to truly see such a thing. That’s where the plenitude of “I don’t know” comes to light.
“Who” is so clear we can see right through it to all beings and the great wide earth—and to our unspeakable desecration and ransack of the earth. But now we have the means to approach the unspeakable with something other than fear. No walls in the mind—there’s the access to the open response that is so close to love. As Gary Snyder said, “Doom scenarios, even though they may be true, are not politically or psychologically effective. The first step . . . is to make us love the world rather than to make us fear for the end of the world.”
Kathleen Dean Moore, nature writer and lifelong activist, sets her level of hope for the earth at one, or “very little hope” (where ten would mean “no worries”). Neither hope nor despair is acceptable, she insists, since both vacate the ground of agency and action. “Between hope and despair is the broad territory of moral integrity,” she explains, “a match between what you believe and what you do. You act lovingly toward your children because you love them. You live simply because you believe in taking only your fair share. You do what’s right because it’s right, not because you will gain from it.” She finds freedom in that, and joy, and insists that genuinely healing social change can happen only in that place between hope and despair, where moral integrity rediscovers itself.
Moral integrity seems to depend on affinity, fellow-feeling, love. How does love inhere in emptiness? Where is compassion housed in this actual body of vast emptiness, nothing holy, in which one thing is constantly becoming another?
Non-Thinking
There’s a deceptively small koan drawn from the words of the Diamond Sutra: Non-thinking. Non-thinking is not acting unthinkingly. It is the consonance with reality and with the earth discovered in Zazen. Non-thinking: Such a small koan to find wrapped around the whole great matter!
Mind in its fullness is equal to the earth, equal to our circumstances here—empty of difference to the nature of the earth. The practice of non-thinking is our way of recovering the poise of being humbly “equal to the earth.” If you can follow along with this, you can see that this ultimately most natural state of mind—oddly called “non-thinking”—is the way back into accord with the terms that the earth presents to us, which are the terms of life.
The wind “bloweth as it listeth”—this is the familiar Biblical description of the movement of grace that can be neither ordered nor willed. The wind blows where blowing is. Those leaves, wet with recent rain, glitter in slow motion as some subtle fingers of breeze riffle through the trees over there on the hill; right here, nothing stirs. There is something so deeply intimate in play in every detail of the natural way of things, that analytical mind can never touch.
But practice can catch up with it. Consider the concert pianist’s or ballet dancer’s rigorous command of spirit that for magical instants can offer something that is complete, founded entirely in a practice of “Try again. Fail better.” Difficulty, over and over, makes the way genuine. Slight success is minor failure. There is a rare adult delight in finding something that finally says to you “Never enough. Let the straw sandals wear out, and then—walk on.” Thus we join (even for a moment) the way everything moves together, and, almost voluptuously, disappear into it.
The pull of gravity, the force of the mass of the earth that holds things together and has shaped human bones, muscles, organs, locomotion; it takes part in what shapes faces, thought, imagination, even dream. Its shaping contributes much of what we call cause and effect. But cause and effect, and gravity itself, has something very strange inside it. A human being might call it love—the earth pulls everything to itself and holds even the moon in thrall. What would the composed weight of a mountain, or the flow of a river call this matter, I wonder? “Gravity”? “Mysterious affinity”? “Non-thinking”? “What it wants”?
This force of attraction is fundamental to a practice of any kind. What calls us into practice is not just the “problem” or nagging resistance of suffering, of difficult things happening and a desire to be released free and at ease within them. For even when pain, loss, fear command us to meet them more directly, that is a kind of love, too. Come! Reality calls us into the wholeness of mind that can meet it.
Practice itself is an act of love, toward that which is better left unnamed. If you name it as the lust for an enlightenment experience, you belittle it and limit yourself to a dream, missing the heart of it. Dedication and persistence is needed, but “success” in meditation is just an idea. That delicately effortful willingness just to really be here is already success at every point in which you offer your heart to it.
Our direct and constant experience of this vast universe is the immediate manifestation we call earth, the body it has shaped, and the awareness of ourselves it has kindled. It is the earth that breaks through that same self-consciousness and wakes us up—some random detail just as it is with no thought attached, finally breaking through the account of reality fabricated by thought.
It was the earth singing “Come!” to an apple that shattered an existing easy “obviousness” when it fell onto Isaac Newton’s head and opened him up to something far more marvelously apparent—the depth of gravity’s mystery. He freely confessed that while he could describe its presence, naming and even measuring gravitational force, that left things more, not less, mysterious. He could begin to identify it as a prime shaper of the universe lying minutely close to the way so many things unfold and inhere—but that clears up nothing about the mutual attraction of things, the strange intimacy inside cause and effect. It only made the mystery clearer.
Robert Aitken once looked into cause and effect to find its innermost seed—a little like taking apart a series of Russian dolls with the mind of un-knowing. You take the head off one to discover another inside, and then another, and another, until there’s just one tiny figure, one innermost seed. The first layer of containment was the word karma.
Containing Everything
Karma—the realm of falling apples sometimes hitting heads—is a word that can take us down unending rabbit holes of hypothesis about fate and destiny and various ways to improve it. But at the simplest level, karma arrives the moment I wake up to myself and acknowledge that what I do and what happens to me are the same thing. When the pain that our own actions has caused arrives in consciousness, karma has come home. Until then, it’s been busy abroad. “But that was in another country,” as Christopher Marlowe put it in The Jew of Malta, “and besides the wench is dead”—cruelly nailing our human gift for shifting and ducking blame. But karma is the Sanskrit word that means, most simply, the way things happen in the relative world. One thing does lead to another. Apples fall on heads, for example. And so, “Unpack karma and you get cause and effect,” said Aitken.
In a way he’s saying don’t try to contrive your fate, just remain as awake as humanly possible to the outcome of your actions—and even earlier and more forensically, try to glimpse your motivations. All the harm and hurt ever caused by any one of us, through our actions, speech, and thoughts, from beginning-less time, belong only to us. This is not as simple as saying either “Do bad and bad will happen to you,” or “Do good or bad things happen to you.” That’s roughly true, though from the point of view of no-separation, accounts are not kept; rather, all ripples finally touch everything. At the deepest level it does not come down to final “bad” or “good” but the fundamental working of one circumstance continually evolving or emptying itself into another, the current of change, empty of fixed entities.
This cause and effect is impermanence itself, an unfolding mystery that yields us into being alone with all that is and is never finished with us. It leaves each thing—including this “self”—as fluid as ground mist. The ground mist rises, yes, and you could somewhat adduce the cause and effect that draws the mist from the ground at this or that moment. But how could you ever finally conclude the why of how it shapes and lifts and entwines itself, quite where it appears and when, or what determines the way it wants to rise and then spread and simply disappear? I once walked to the dojo to give evening teisho and found the ground mist waiting in a brief column on the verandah, a momentary being, standing right by the door! What can we finally determine or claim to know about the ceaseless unfolding of cause and effect apart from “It bloweth as it listeth”?
In a sense we must blame cause and effect for the universe, the earth, and, of course, ourselves! Cause and effect is the great chain of happenings that by some miracle arrives at us, now, breathing by the grace of miraculous organs in our body that have been and continue to be intricately shaped by cause and effect.
And when we look at such things as a feather, an eye, a spine, a skull—how delicate this cause and effect is, how brilliant its intelligent patterns of chaos, the infinite, subtle designs that arise from it! An old Chinese maxim reminds us “Heaven is ruthless.” I stand amazed before such exquisitely particular “productions of time” and the ruthlessly impartial nature of the unfolding we call impermanence, which conforms with our wishes only rarely and by chance. This ruthlessness—the tiger’s kindness—endows us with everything, in the course of which it quite naturally asks that we pass all we have on to others and in the end keep nothing for ourselves.
And yet cause and effect is also what joins everything up, forms every holding pattern of relationship that collaborates in creating us. So it’s worth studying “Unpack karma and you get cause and effect” for some time. A lifetime, for example.
Next, “Unpack cause and effect, and you get affinity.” A poet said, “The beautiful earth, as we know, belongs to those who are like it.” Well, we cannot help being like it, can we? Remember Daopi the elder being asked, “What is it that you love?” and saying, “I have already become like this.” “Like this”—the shine on the leaves, drone of incoming plane, the sorrow you express, the tortured faces of asylum seekers, the burning forests of Alberta, the seeping of methane from melting permafrost . . . “Like this” means simply our most intimate identity and belonging—realizing that we can’t be told apart from all this. That we are not carved out from it, that our perceived insularity is merely the prevailing act of self-alienation.
The force of the teisho of the actual body is to see this clearly with immediate gut recognition: That while we say “cause and effect” as though there are two bits of business here, there is just one bit of business anywhere, one continual moment that swallows up every division our minds can put upon it. Call it causation, impermanence, change, the tiger’s kindness, the great chance, affinity pervading the whole universe, or whatever you wish, it is not two; and we “players” in the drama of existence are wholly that, too. The great gift of the affinity inside “cause and effect” is that there is no other.
Affinity is what draws us to “become like this” and describes the waking realization that we’ve never actually been anything else. Affinity dawns in the state of consciousness called non-thinking, the curiosity, openness, and acceptance that is Zazen. Affinity is the way one thing is actually falling and folding into another because of the complete equality of no-thing seated at the heart of all things. There’s affinity between the baby you once were and the old person you will one day become should you live so long. Affinity is the intimate communion event constantly at play inside “cause and effect.” To call it the Dao is simply to admit we finally can’t clear up the mystery of the evident, natural way of all things.
What’s said to be “known” about the Dao is very slight: that it moves, and is said to be older than God—meaning its origin lies beyond or before knowing. Thinking can’t know it; but in the grace of non-thinking, it can know us. It is plain that cause and effect is actually continuous movement—the unfolding-ness of things rests entirely in never ceasing. And it is plain that it is not subject to our wishes, and that at the deepest level, in the things that count, there’s no final resting place of better or worse within an infinite unfolding.
“Unpack affinity, and you get the tendency to coalesce.” There’s the next Russian doll. Which is to say affinity opens the way of endlessly becoming everything around us. When we look at the moon we become something that is both moon and us at once. We coalesce: Human eye and moon lumens mutually “actualize” the moon three million miles away exactly here where we stand, head tipped back, mouth slightly open to the stars.
Can you finally tell yourself apart from the sounds of the birds and breeze, the ever-changing light? The moment we relax back into ourselves, coalescence is the most fitting description of what we find happening. And that’s one aspect of why Dogen says, “The green mountains are always walking.” Exactly like you, and with you, they are evolving, coalescing with water and wind and fire—and you—in endless free exchange of self. Seeing the green mountains as you walk, non-thinking, green mountains are walking, too. Shakyamuni Buddha looked up and saw the morning star and realized his true nature. At that moment you cannot say Shakyamuni Buddha or star low in the eastern sky.
Not one poignant, infinitely varied form of this living world can be separated from the moon of Mind, as it is sometimes called. One of the most beautiful of the Miscellaneous Koans asks, “What is the blown-hair sword?” Traditionally you would test a sharpened sword blade by blowing a human hair onto it. If the blade sliced the hair in two, it was known as a blown-hair sword, sharper than sharp. So what is the keenest blade that cuts through everything without moving an inch? The koan just gets deeper in the response it offers to its own question: Each branch of the coral holds up the light of the moon. You, me, tears, laughter, unicorns, wombats, and bacilli . . . All moonlight!
The next step: “Unpack the tendency to coalesce and you get intimacy.” True intimacy goes beyond nearness or even direct touching; it’s complete coalescence with mind. It’s one thing to discover yourself to be vivid in all things, and all things revealed in each thing. Intimacy is the experience and enjoyment of this—this. Gerard Manley Hopkins called it the “dearest freshness deep down thing,” acknowledging how it continually stirs the heart-mind into life. Yunmen called it “One treasure hidden in the body.” That’s the patter of rain on a tin roof and scuttle of little skink for cover under leaves, the warmth of your own two hands clasped, the delicate sorrow of a gray day, winter coming on. One treasure hidden in the body of all things, impossible to separate from “the tendency to coalesce.”
Next, “Unpack intimacy, and you will find that you contain all beings.” When intimacy is clear and impossible to dislodge, then what can we say about this powerful sense of “containment” except “Yes, of course”? And then “What can I do to help?” You can’t take “you” out of all things, nor all things out of “you.” How wondrous. This no-barrier is evident just in breathing, walking, seeing, touching, being touched, hearing, tasting, and forming thought. Long before some big experience befell you, or not, this matter was completely settled.
We sense it, too, in any unforced encounter with another creature, stopping thought in its tracks. A tiny marsupial mouse, genus Antechinus, sometimes comes right up to where I’m writing and even dares perch on my shoulder for an instant, examining the contents of my screen. In such a moment, being human, “I” shifts a little into “Antechinus”; sentience coalesces. This delightful tiny long-nosed, playful creature. Compelled by it, I have part share in its impossible speed and agility as I cannot help but commit it to heart. Human beings have the peculiar gift of being able to lean into the open presence of another creature and be grabbed, letting them in “unawares.” And there’s one more of the many ways we can see into “containing all beings.”
It may be what we’re here for. Alice Walker commented that her stories, which tend to be set in the deep south of America among poor black people, are seen in China as being extremely Chinese. People there have said to her, “When I read your books you might as well be talking about me.” And she has said, “If you are prepared to go right down completely through yourself, you come up inside all people.”
So containment morphs into power to face circumstances front-on just as they are, and just as we are, neither advancing nor retreating but engaging directly with what is, rather than what “should be.” It’s a lifelong practice and endows us with a long life however long or short life is.
Whenever you get down to what must surely be the final Russian doll, you can anticipate something dramatically tiny—little more than a seed, with tiny skilled paint splashes suggesting a figure like all the others. So what is the minute seed at the very core of everything? “Unpack containment and there is the Goddess of Mercy herself.” That’s Guanyin, compassion herself. So that’s where she is, right at the heart of all karma!
And notice that by this stage, verbal constructions involving you have ceased. Or to put it differently, no-self comes forth with this one, and comes forth in the action of nonthinking—which is our human approach to unconditioned, unconditional awareness, our very best effort to sustain that. Compassion itself. It is “unconditioned” because it does not split itself off from anything and cannot find anything to split, and “unconditional” because it accepts and moves in sympathy with every condition in which it finds itself.
It’s curious, interested, alert, and poised, this non-thinking that links karma with its core of compassion, and if you persist with it, you find nothing to oppose, nothing to defend. Because it does not oppose “this” with “that,” it is compassion; and because it is compassion, it moves in accord with the nature of what is. Renunciation cannot make it more pure, explanation will never penetrate it. Even the finest meditation cannot make it more so—in other words, “Benefit what cannot be benefited”! It is reality itself, and no kind of attainment.
Non-thinking, the mind of practice, is simply a disposition toward greater intimacy with this. Non-thinking is already so close to that to which it responds that you cannot separate cause from effect anymore. And so non-thinking is the secret antidote to boredom or unease. When you neither object to nor are confronted by your circumstances but meet them directly, there’s nothing confronting or objectionable to be found in them. Just the endless koan of reality that jumps-starts the heart: What is this? Who is this self?
Flowing Outward
Finally, there’s another insignificant-looking Miscellaneous Koan that looks into this endlessly unfolding play of “just responding,” the way the dance of the ground mist just responds to subtle and capricious currents of air that no one can track. It’s this: When the wind blows, the downy willow seed floats away. Have you ever seen floating clouds of willow seed? So ready to float that before the wind can even fully arrive, the downy seed is off, gone. When my children were babies I would find myself responding in the dead of night almost before the smallest murmur could reach my ears—not yet fully awake, yet one foot already on the floor.
There is a degree of effortlessness in Zen practice that might not be the first thing to meet the eye. It is a kind of poised readiness that, like compassion, responds earlier than thought. It takes real effort to arrive at the effortlessness of the downy willow seed, poised to respond, relying exactly on what is happening. When the barely perceptible breeze of change arrives, the poised readiness and attunement of non-thinking moves with it.
It’s a little like those “people of ancient times” who could not see “things,” could barely see boundaries between them, let alone carve out right and wrong as distinct. The “actual body” is this congruency of mind with reality, gathered in, standing apart from nothing.
So here we are, stumbling in the dark, seeing a little, clarifying it a little more, becoming a little more “like this,” extending that outward in service to the other. Becoming more genuine through the whole wear and tear and mixed quality of it all—providing the beautiful daily struggle, to be congruent. There’s the teisho of the actual body! Call and response arriving together.
Paulo Freire’s call to become congruent reminds me of the great sycamore tree standing in a Wendell Berry poem. Very old trees, scarred survivor trees that outlive the odds and become a whole ecology of bacteria, mites, worms, borers, beetles, birds, reptiles, mammals, and eventually rich humus for new seeds—have always won my heart. Human beings can sometimes come to closely resemble this. I think of the late Daniel Berrigan, for example, activist, mystic, fighter, as I read:
In the place that is my own place,
whose earth I am shaped in and must bear,
there is an old tree growing—
a great Sycamore that is
a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it,
nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it,
the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it.
There is a hollow in it that is its death,
though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Life is the gift you give away. Its finitude bestows all that we manage to bring to flower and care and love in this life. Life-and-death is the ground note of this shared lifelong teisho of the actual body, to which we all add our singular, distinctive note. It brims and flows steadily outward from the lip of ultimate darkness to whitely cover heaven and earth for—well, for each other, which is only for our benefit. It prompts the teisho of the actual body—the expressive response of just this person in embodying the miraculous tenacity of the red thread that cannot, will not, must not be cut.
It is undivided, pushes nothing away, can find nothing that is not like it, has nothing it dislikes, actively seeks ever to be more congruent (for its own joy), flowing out to cover heaven and earth for each other, healing earth and its resounding consciousness, in humanly becoming like this.