UnMind 69. Matsuoka on Hakuin Duet 2 — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

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See the real dragon —
but make sure you hear its roar —
the meaning of Life!

In the last segment we covered the first half of Matsuoka Roshi’s commentary on Hakuin Zenji’s “Song of Zazen.” Now we will review the rest, where he shifts gears a bit. Where we left off, he touches on our tendency to overlook certain details of our life and Zen practice, thinking we are doing enough already. But he warns us, we assume from his own, personal experience:

If there is error in our life, we cannot think it too small to be corrected, as we might think the mist too slight to be noticed. If we go on in these errors, we will travel farther from the truth and never find it.

I knew Matsuoka Roshi well enough to know that he did not consider himself perfect, by any means. But I think he was resolved to accept his karmic fate, whatever disappointments it may include. So I do not take his message to us to be a moralistic imperative from on high, but a personal note from a friend and fellow-traveler who wishes us the best, and to share his lessons from the school of hard knocks. The analogy of the mist accumulating to saturate our clothes cuts both ways — if you associate with positive circumstances and conditions, you will become soaked in those influences, just as surely as you will with negative ones. You have to exercise the discernment as to which are positive, or negative, for you.

Zen meditation destroys the erroneous thoughts by revealing this truth. It teaches us that all along, we have been living in this Enlightened world, but have been blind to it. It teaches us that our erroneous ways have kept us from seeing its light. The Buddha-nature is within each of us, but it has been long hidden by the errors of the past and the ignorance that for centuries has been the traditions of the world. We have been reared in these traditional ways of thinking and have been taught to desire and cling to that which is either unattainable or transitory. Both bring pain. We cannot have what cannot be caught and held. Our lives become unending searches for happiness which only end in disillusionment. Zen will reveal to us our true nature and the true nature of life, so that:
The moon which rests reflected in the water of the pure heart, when the wave breaks, becomes light!
The Buddha-nature is within each of us to become a light that will shine forth when our lives become inseparable from meditation.

So this last summary is the statement of Great Faith in Zen, that Buddha-nature is innate, our birthright. Zazen is the switch that flips on the endless moonlight of Zen.

A Zen priest once wrote that one sometimes hears that it is necessary to retire to a mountain away from the world, or perhaps to bury oneself in some old temple, to discard humanity and become a so-called hermit to practice meditation. Of course, for some, to attain realization into one’s true nature, it might be necessary to retire in this way for a time, but this is not the object for all. The priest continued, Zen means to
bring the power of Zen meditation to bear directly upon our present daily life, to vivify it.

Sensei captures the practical function of retreat in the householder’s practice of Zen. The monastic or hermitage model may be for some, but not many. Zen is for everyone, as we say. So moderation in the pursuit of Zen is in order. The use of the word, “vivify” is vintage Matsuoka. Zen brings life to our life.

Withdrawing into meditation, and then advancing and handling affairs — this advancing and withdrawing, movement and rest, together, must be Zen. A master says that going is Zen and sitting is also Zen. A Taoist classic says: “The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement can the spiritual rhythm appear which pervades heaven and earth. An ancient adds: “Meditation in activity is a hundred, a thousand, a million times superior to meditation in repose.” So greatly does he esteem meditation in activity.

Again, stressing the vacillation between ordinary affairs, and the sanctuary of meditation in the midst of life, this is our prescription for lay practice. The halo effect of zazen carries over into everything:

One of the Temple members who lives out of state has written to me that she has discovered this small secret… “Sometimes I notice that after practicing zazen anything I do is just right — washing clothes, cleaning the house, walking in the garden, etc. There doesn’t seem to be something else more important to be doing. I seem to be all there, not divided in my attention. Zen makes every moment meaningful.” [She] has written that now that her life of work and meditation has helped her to give up attachments, the more deeply she feels things. She wrote that it was like a miracle how deep her feeling has become and how alive her life is now.

You may have read passages like this in the American literature of Zen, which seem to suggest that this attitude is something you can and should intentionally cultivate, and apply when doing household chores. But Sensei stresses that it can only arise naturally, and that the mundane act of sitting still enough for long enough, is what triggers the carryover.

He returns to Hakuin’s song:

A sutra teaches that by the practice of meditation, the lake of the heart becomes pure and calm, and when the lake of the ordinary man’s heart becomes pure, the reflection that appears within it is of a Bodhisattva. When the well-spring of the heart is purified, the wrong paths which otherwise appear as a result of his wrong actions, to that man become as if non-existent. How should there be wrong paths for him? His heart has become the meditation room. In its purity, neither the wrong paths or the wrong actions could exist. The world of light, of virtue, appears and now our daily life has a changed meaning and deeper depth. In fact, for the first time, ordinary life becomes radiant with real meaning. This vitality that can fill our daily life is for each of us to find.

“His heart has become the meditation room,” while a curious construction in English, Sensei’s second language, captures the non-separation of the sentient being and its environment in a compelling phrase. But Sensei does not mean this metaphorically. He is describing the all-embracing compassion that one feels from zazen. Someone said that Zen is the pursuit of the understanding of meaning. But from Sensei’s description we can see that we do not, finally, understand the meaning of our life, but that life itself becomes imbued with its true meaning through the insight of meditation, which is beyond all understanding. He goes on to illustrate this with a true story of a real dragon:

Let me tell you the story of its discovery by one man, Kano Tanyu, an artist who was known to paint dragons that were so realistic that when a ceiling on which one had been painted fell down by chance, some said it had been caused by the movement of the dragon’s tail. When the ceiling in the Myoshinji Temple became dull, the Zen Master, Gudo, sent for Kano Tanyu to paint a dragon on his ceiling. But, Gudo told the artist, “For this special occasion I particularly want to have the painting of the dragon done from life.”
Naturally the painter was taken aback and said, “This is most unexpected. As a matter of fact, I am ashamed to say that I have never seen a living dragon.” The Zen teacher, however, agreed that it would be unreasonable to expect a painting of a living dragon from an artist who had never seen one, but told him to try to have a look at one as soon as he could. The painter asked wonderingly: “Where can one see a living dragon? Where do they dwell?” The Zen master answered: “Oh, that’s nothing. At my place there are any number. Come and see them and paint one.”
Tanyu went joyfully with the teacher and when they arrived, at once he asked: “Well, here I am to see the dragons. Where are they?” The teacher, letting his gaze go around the room, replied: “Plenty of them here: can’t you see them? What a pity!” The painter felt overcome with regret, and he undertook the serious study of Zen in the Temple of Gudo.
One day something happened, and he rushed excitedly to the teacher, saying, “Today I have seen the form of a live dragon!” The master answered: “Oh, have you? Good. But tell me, what did his roar sound like?” At this, the painter was again at a loss, and for another year, he labored on at his spiritual life.
What he painted at the end of that year was the dragon of Myoshinji, a supreme masterpiece in the history of art, remarkable for its technique, but far more for the life which the artist infused into it. It seems as if it contains the great Life which embraces heaven and earth, the universe and man. The experience of reality which Kano Tanyu attained when listening for the roar of the dragon transcended time.
This is the way our ordinary lives must become — infused with the sense of reality so that they transcend time, pain and desire. It is a life that finds that the Pure Land paradise is not far away; a life free from the wrong paths, a life of the Buddha.

That was quite a dose. But I felt that the whole story of Kano Tanyu, Master Gudo, and the living dragon whose portrait may be seen on the wall of Myoshinji, is of one piece. The “great Life” in the last paragraph is capitalized to emphasize the importance of living Zen, one of Sensei’s frequent tropes. When we see the dragon, we become the dragon, and we come alive in zazen.