Unmoving wisdom (part two)

PASSAGES FROM TAISEN DESHIMARU "THE ZEN WAY TO THE MARTIAL ARTS"

Human beings are not like lions and tigers, so the way of Budo [Wu Shu] must not be like them either. The tiger and lion are strong, and their instinct and desire make them want to win. It never occurs to them to abandon their ego. But human beings can go beyond the ego and death. In Budo, they must become even stronger than the lion or the tiger, and discard the animal instinct that clings to the human spirit.

Two hundred years ago in Japan there was a kendo [sword] master named Shoken, whose home was infested by a huge rat. Every night this big rat came to Shoken’s house and kept him awake. He had to do his sleeping by day. He consulted a friend of his who kept cats, a sort of cat trainer. Shoken said, “Lend me your best cat.”

The cat trainer lent him an alley cat, extremely quick and adept at rat-catching, with stout claws and far-springing muscles. But when he came face to face with the rat in the room, the rat stood his ground and the cat had to turn tail and run. There was decidedly something very special about that rat.

Shoken then borrowed a second cat, a ginger one, with a terrific ki [qi] and an aggressive personality. This second cat stood his ground, so it and the rat fought; but the rat got the best of it and the cat beat a hasty retreat.

A third cat was procured and pitted against the rat – this one was black and white – but it could no more overcome the rat than the other two.

Shoken then borrowed yet another cat, the fourth; it was black, and old, and not stupid, but not so strong as the alley cat or the ginger cat. It walked into the room. The rat stared at it awhile, then moved forward. The black cat sat down, very collected, and remained utterly motionless. A tiny doubt flitted through the rat. He edged a little closer and a little closer; he was just a little bit afraid. Suddenly the cat caught him by the neck and killed him and dragged him away.

Then Shoken went to see his cat-training friend and said to him, “How many times have I chased that rat with my wooden sword, but instead of my hitting him he would scratch me; why was your black cat able to get the best of him?”

The friend said, “What we should do is call a meeting and ask the cats themselves. You’re a kendo master, so you ask the questions; I’m pretty certain they understand all about martial arts.”

So there was an assembly of cats, presided over by the black cat which was the oldest of them all. The alley cat took the floor and said, “I am very strong.”

The black cat asked, “Then why didn’t you win?”

The alley cat answered, “Really, I am very strong; I know hundreds of different techniques for catching rats. My claws are stout and my muscles far-springing. But this rat was no ordinary rat.”

The black cat said, “So your strength and your techniques aren’t equal to those of the rat. Maybe you do have a lot of muscles and a lot of wasa [technique], but skill alone was not enough. No way!”

Then the ginger cat spoke: “I am enormously strong, I am constantly exercising my ki and my breathing through zazen [sitting meditation]. I live on vegetables and rice soup and that’s why I have so much energy. But I too was unable to overcome that rat. Why?”

The old black cat answered, “Your activity and energy are great indeed, but that rat was beyond your energy; you are weaker than that big rat. If you are attached to your ki, proud of it, it becomes like so much flab. Your ki is just a sudden surge, it cannot last, and all that is left is a furious cat. Your ki could be compared to water flowing from a faucet; but that of the rat is like a great geyser. That’s why the rat is stronger than you. Even if you have a strong ki, in reality it is weak because you have too much confidence in yourself.”

Next came the turn of the black-and-white cat, which had also been defeated. He was not so very strong, but he was intelligent. He had satori [awakening], he had finished with wasa and spent all his time practising zazen. But he was not mushotoku (that is, without any goal or desire for profit), and so he too had to run for his life.

The black cat told him, “You’re extremely intelligent, and strong, too. But you couldn’t beat the rat because you had an object, so the rat’s intuition was more effective than yours. The instant you walked into the room it understood your attitude and state of mind, and that’s why you could not overcome it. You were unable to harmonize your strength, your technique, and your active consciousness; they remained separate instead of blending into one.

"Whereas I, in a single moment, used all three faculties unconsciously, naturally and automatically, and that is how I was able to kill the rat.

"But I know a cat, in a village not far from here, that is even stronger than I am. He is very, very old and his whiskers are all gray. I met him once, and there’s certainly nothing strong-looking about him! He sleeps all day. He never eats meat or even fish, nothing but rice soup, although sometimes he does take a drop of sake. And he has never caught a single rat because they’re all scared to death of him and scatter like leaves in the wind. They keep so far away that he has never had a chance to catch even one. One day he went into a house that was positively overrun with rats; well, every rat decamped on the instant and went to live in some other house. He could chase them away in his sleep. This old graybeard cat really is mysterious and impressive. You must become like him: beyond posture, beyond breathing, beyond consciousness.”

For Shoken, the kendo master, this was a great lesson.

In zazen, you are already beyond posture, beyond breathing, beyond consciousness …

… In zazen, our energy and mind harmonize with the energy of the cosmos, and that infinite energy governs and directs our own energy.

Unmoving wisdom (part one)

PASSAGES FROM TAISEN DESHIMARU “THE ZEN WAY TO THE MARTIAL ARTS”

The master’s mind is never still. It never dwells on any one thing or person. It lets all go by …

Nor does the body dwell.

The essence of his self, of the self, is unmoving wisdom. Intuition, wisdom, physical action, are always one. That is the secret of zazen [sitting meditation], and of the martial arts. Just as the martial arts are not sports, zazen is not some kind of massage or spiritual culture …

… the actual school of kendo [swordsmanship] began in 1346; it was founded by a samurai named Nodo, followed, in 1348, by Shinkage. At first the samurai wanted to obtain special powers: striking, remarkable, magical abilities. They wanted to go through fire without being burned or be able to have a boulder fall on them without being crushed. So they trained their minds deliberately to obtain supernatural abilities and powers, and they were anything but disinterested.

Later, they came under the influence of Zen. Miyamoto Musashi, for instance, who was Japan’s greatest kendo master, also became a sage. He said, “One must respect God and Buddha, but not be dependent upon them.”

At that point, the way that taught how to cut one’s enemies in two became the way that taught how to cut one’s own mind. A way of decision, resolution, determination. That was true Japanese kendo, true Budo [Wu Shu]. Strength and victory flow from decisiveness. One moves beyond the level at which most people stop, one transcends the conflict, transforms it into a spiritual progress. There was nothing sportlike about training in those days; the samurai had a higher vision of life.

Zen and the martial arts have nothing to do with keeping fit or improving health, either. People in the West always want to use things; but the spirit of Zen cannot be squeezed into so narrow a system. And Zen is not some sort of spiritual massage – although the kyosaku [flat stick] can very effectively massage mind or body. Zazen is not meant to make you feel relaxed and happy, any more than the martial arts are a game or sport. Their significance is deeper and more essential, it is that of life.

On Tai Ji

                              I learn Tai Ji

because:

“ … life has an extra dimension of expression, wordless but powerful … it carries the development of this physical expression to ultimate limits. It is by no means just a series of exercises and gymnastics, but an art in which no two performers are identical because each one puts into it something of himself, his very soul …”

This is somewhat apart from normal life … intelligence and instinct in uniting body and mind … there is no Pretention!

Tai Ji (I was taught) is not a vocation, nor a profession, more so, not striving to be a “master” … it is not for fishing Money or hooking Fame, but it is a blessing granted to all who have the inclination to enjoy it.

Learning a Chinese Internal Martial Art, one ­­does not have to use it as an instrument, but Love it, Treasure it, Respect it, even if you think you don’t gain anything from doing it!­ I think: any bargaining spirit spreads unhealthy Qi, which is all the “Magic Qi” is doing! It is destroying the precious Gift provided by the Great Nature, for us to Develop … the Qi … its Scent is Health.


[the quotation is from Margot Fonteyn, “A Dancer’s World”]

Purposeless growth

PASSAGES FROM ALAN WATTS “THE WAY OF ZEN”

Taoism, Confucianism and Zen are expressions of a mentality which feels completely at home in this universe, and which sees man as an integral part of his environment. Human intelligence is … an aspect of the whole intricately balanced organism of the natural world, whose principles were first explored in the “Book of Changes”. Heaven and earth are alike members of this organism, and nature is as much our father as our mother, since the Tao by which it works is originally manifested in the “yang” and the “yin” – the male and female, positive and negative principles which, in dynamic balance, maintain the order of the world. The insight which lies at the root of Far Eastern culture is that opposites are relational and so fundamentally harmonious. Conflict is always comparatively superficial, for there can be no ultimate conflict when the pairs of opposites are mutually interdependent. Thus our stark divisions of spirit and nature, subject and object, good and evil, artist and medium are quite foreign to this culture.

In a universe whose fundamental principle is relativity rather than warfare there is no purpose because there is no victory to be won, no end to be attained. For every end, as the word itself shows, is an extreme, an opposite, and exists only in relation to its other end. Because the world is not going anywhere there is no hurry. One may as well “take it easy” like nature itself, and in the Chinese language the “changes” of nature and “ease” are the same word, “i”. This is a first principle in the study of Zen and of any Far Eastern art: hurry, and all that it involves, is fatal. For there is no goal to be attained. The moment a goal is conceived it becomes impossible to practice the discipline of the art, to master the very rigour of its technique. Under the watchful and critical eye of a master one may practise the writing of Chinese characters for days and days, months and months. But he watches as a gardener watches the growth of a tree, and wants his student to have the attitude of the tree – the attitude of purposeless growth in which there are no short cuts because every stage of the way is both beginning and end. Thus the most accomplished master no more congratulates himself upon “arriving” than the most fumbling beginner.

Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world. Absence of hurry also involves a certain lack of interference with the natural course of events, especially when it is felt that the natural course follows principles which are not foreign to human intelligence. For, as we have seen, the Taoist mentality makes, or forces, nothing but “grows” everything. When human reason is seen to be the expression of the same spontaneous balance of “yang” and “yin” as the natural universe, man’s action upon his environment is not felt as a conflict, an action from outside. Thus the difference between forcing and growing cannot be expressed in terms of specific directions as to what should or should not be done, for the difference lies primarily in the quality and feeling of the action. The difficulty of describing these things for Western ears is that people in a hurry cannot feel …

… A world which increasingly consists of destinations without journeys between them, a world which values only “getting somewhere” as fast as possible, becomes a world without substance. One can get anywhere and everywhere, and yet the more this is possible, the less is anywhere and everywhere worth getting to. For points of arrival are too abstract, too Euclidean to be enjoyed, and it is all very much like eating the precise ends of a banana without getting what lies in between. The point, therefore, of these arts is the doing of them rather than the accomplishments. But, more than this, the real joy of them lies in what turns up unintentionally in the course of practice, just as the joy of travel is not nearly so much in getting where one wants to go as in the unsought surprises which occur on the journey.

On enlightenment

To me –

Enlightenment makes me feel lighter: I lose.

Knowledge makes me feel heavier: I gain.

Learning from experience

PASSAGES FROM ROBERT POWELL “ZEN AND REALITY”

There are Buddhists [or Tai Ji cowboy masters, or Qi Gong performers, or herbal medicine men etc] in the West who would like nothing better than to import Japanese Zen [Chinese Chan] lock, stock and barrel – with its monasteries, koan techniques, etc. This, I think, would not only amount to the height of absurdity but would go directly against the whole spirit of Zen. Zen [Chan] is not static but flexible and expresses itself in different forms according to time, place and circumstances. The important point is that Zen grew to its present form in Japan as part and parcel of Japanese culture and within this cultural framework developed as an historical necessity.

The principle of Zen being, “Let it settle itself – without external moulding, or cultivation”, Zen must and, I think, will settle itself also in the West and when left to do so grow into a form which will be found to be hundred per cent appropriate to our cultural and historical background.

The essential thing to realize, however, is that in final analysis it is only the Zen experience that counts – the approach and the experience are still worlds apart. The former is confined within the limits of conceptual thinking and as such liable to argument, to opinion – the experience, however, is beyond the level of concepts and independent of space and time. Consequently there is always a danger that the “preparation” of the mind, the awakening of intelligence, which aims only at clearing away the obstacles to the experience, is taken as an end in itself with the result that one obstacle has only been replaced by another [sad!]. In Zen terminology this is described as taking the finger which points to the Moon for the Moon.

We see this sort of pitfall clearly exemplified in certain types of Yoga: one may read in Yoga literature, for example, that the carrying out of certain exercises – breathing, meditating in a particular posture and what not – is all that is required and bound to lead to enlightenment in the end if only pursued long enough. In actual fact all these conscious efforts of the mind to “get” enlightenment may well form the greatest hindrance to that experience. The importation of Japanese techniques without more ado is almost certain to lead to just such a situation. Once this damage is done and Zen has become just another cult amongst many, we may wish we had never heard of Japanese Zen methods.

We must face the fact that it is unfortunately not possible to “teach” anybody to have the Zen experience. It is, however, possible to point out some of the most formidable obstacles which stand in the way of that experience, particularly for us in the West. In the main they are the following three:- 

There is first the general idea of gain in people’s minds as when on first hearing of Zen they immediately ask “what do I get out of it?” In other words, even Zen should serve them in the process of becoming; in looking for a purpose in the future and thereby escaping from what is here and now. It is this everlasting striving for fulfilment, to make purposeful what is purposeless by setting up some goal which has to be attained at all costs, and for which end we are even prepared to kill one another – it is this continuous struggle that has fostered the delusion of the “me” and the “mine” and brought about the effective isolation of the individual. The process has been operative particularly in the West where competition for material wealth has always been extremely severe, especially since the time of the Industrial Revolution.

A second obstacle is the tendency to question everything according to a moral yardstick: something is either good, or it is evil, virtuous or wicked. The desire for such facile classification is in actual fact based on an undercurrent of righteousness – which is only another form of covering up our feeling of emptiness, of nothingness – that is, the expression of a kind of moral inferiority complex. 

And third, there is the dualistic notion of body and mind, mind and matter, which – as Easterners see it – is the malady of the West: we are all suffering from this schizophrenia. Following from this we often have arguments as to which is better; the Christian attitude of looking outward or the Buddhist attitude of looking inward. But in reality there is no problem here: there is no difference between outward and inward – this is all a delusion based upon “thinking”, i.e. putting “things” in a space-time framework of reference and upon the fallacious dualistic notion of body versus mind.