UnMind 84. Tetrad & Zazen — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

SUBSCRIBE TO UNMIND:

RSS FEED | APPLE PODCASTS | GOOGLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY

He was the great sage
who said no need for zazen —
if you grasp the truth

At the beginning of the last section on analysis and systems modeling, I suggested it may be worthwhile to delve a bit more deeply into applying the tetrad to the scope of activities in daily life as well as directly to Zen practice, particularly zazen. And that we would continue along these lines with yet another variation on the tetrad theme, looking at things from a four-pointed perspective. It turns out that there are many tropes and memes in Buddhism that consist of four parts, starting with the Four Noble Truths. Another is attributed to the 28th Patriarch in India, first in China, the formidable Bodhidharma. He is said to have suggested four areas of observation that are characteristic of meditation, at that time of course not referred to as Zen, or Ch’an, as it later was. The four main areas he defined are observing the breath, the physical sensations, the emotional mood swings, and the mental conceptions that we come up with in and about meditation.

The semantic model illustration includes my first draft attempt to fill out the four subsets within each of these four main objects of observation. You may want to substitute other aspects as you see fit. Under breath, I have listed very simple dimensions, such as inhaling and exhaling, counting and following the breath, which are characteristic of our typical instructions for breathing while in zazen.

The most important may be the last listed, that is that we follow the breath, rather than try to control it. This principle really applies to all the other dimensions of zazen meditation as well, such as that we actually follow the body in zazen. It knows, and will eventually teach us the natural posture, so we cannot really get it wrong unless we refuse to listen to what our body is telling us.

Under the physical component of the model, we find the five conventional physical senses, including that of the body itself, usually lumped under the tactility of the skin as the largest organ of the body. But “body” includes all the internal sensations of weight, the sense of balance and location in space, or proprioception, plus the many ancillary sensations such as itching and various aches and pains. The other organs of the physical body come into play in meditation, such as the eyes, for which we recommend practicing a fixed gaze, rather than closing them as is recommended in the popular forms of so-called “mindfulness” meditation. To which I query, how mindful can it be if it excludes vision, our primary source of incoming information? But I digress.

The ears are considered perhaps more accessible to the settling of the mind through deep listening, than the more acute stimuli received through seeing, and the resistance we encounter in the realm of feeling, the accommodation of the body to sitting still in upright meditation. The nose and tongue play a relatively minor role, in that they adapt very quickly to the lack of stimulation of fragrance and flavor. However, once we have become comfortable with the physical dimensions of meditation, the emotional and mental begin to kick in.

Under what the great sage classified as emotional sensations, or mood swings, I have listed four pairs of mood or affect that I have come across in my experience as well as in studying dharma and modern analysis of psychological phenomena. Elation or “bliss” is sometimes touted as the goal of meditation, as in “pursuing your bliss,” another pop trope of the New Age perspective on spiritual practice. In Zen, we recognize such highs as the natural vacillation between extremes with the lows, such as depression or milder forms such as ennui or melancholy. We are all bipolar, which becomes manic-depressive at its extreme manifestations.

Serenity versus anxiety is another way of saying the same thing, perhaps more influenced by the social sphere of our daily lives, which provide plenty of rationales for experiencing anxiety, and not many opportunities to settle into serenity. Thus the existence of Zen centers, temples and monasteries. As Master Dogen reminds us in Jijuyu Zammai [Self-Fulfilling Samadhi] (emphasis mine):

Grass trees and lands which are embraced by this teaching
together radiate a great light
and endlessly expound the inconceivable profound dharma
Grass trees and walls
bring forth the teaching for all beings
common people as well as sages
and they in accord extend this dharma for the sake of grass trees and walls

Emphasizing the “walls” in this passage points to the “realm of self-awakening and awakening others” mentioned earlier in the same teaching, the efforts that the ancestors made to provide environments conducive to training. Achok Rinpoche mentioned this as a form of dana, or Buddhist generosity, in his guest talk at our Zen center some years ago. The walls of the zendo represent this extension of dharma for the sake of grass and trees, complementing the manifestation of dharma in the form of Nature.

Faith and doubt as a binary encapsulate another vacillation in the emotional sphere, which provide another contrast with pop spirituality as well as traditional forms of theism. A conventional interpretation of faith is that it brooks no doubt, and even regards the appearance of doubt as a crisis of faith. In Zen, you are advised to “keep your doubt at a keen edge,” an old saying its attribution lost to memory. The more doubt we feel, the more faith we are called upon to exercise, just as we manifest courage in the presence of a high threshold of fear, not the absence of fear. If we can take the appropriate action, in the face of great fear or doubt, we can be said to be courageous, or faithful, respectively. If our faith is dependent upon the absence of any challenge that would create doubt, it is a faux faith, and will not stand the test of time and circumstance. Even Buddha admonished us to not take his teaching on faith, but to test it out in the crucible of our own experience.

The last dyad, excitement and exhaustion, I have heard is a Tibetan description of the last vacillation that we can expect to encounter in meditation. Excitement at the prospect of some transformation being possible, some insight into the reality of nonduality, spiritual awakening, et cetera, however you might wish to characterize your aspiration to Bodhi mind. But at the same time exhaustion, extreme weariness at the continuing frustration of trying so hard and seemingly getting nowhere, plateauing again and again in your quest for understanding. Proceeding in the face of little or no indication of progress is the prescription for zazen. Like the last 10 yards of the hundred yard dash, it doesn’t get any easier as we approach what we hope is the finish line. And it doesn’t help to be reminded there is no finish line. The worse it gets, the better it is, expresses the ironic perversity of the dilemma. Just don’t give up was my teacher’s advice to me. And mine to you.

Lastly but not leastly in Bodhidharma’s model of meditation observation is the mental machinations we undergo courtesy of the monkey mind, but also as a natural process of the empirical method of observing primarily the evidence of the senses, but also reflection: going over and over it in our minds. This second part of empirical process is where we can go down the rabbit hole of rumination, obsessive-compulsive habit patterns of thought. But it is also the source of the highest achievements of the arts and sciences, when analytical reasoning is balanced by intuitive insight. This is testified to by the third Patriarch in China, the estimable Master Sengcan, in his poem Hsinhsinming — Trust in Mind:

If you wish to move in the One Way do not dislike even the world of senses and ideas
Indeed to accept them fully is identical with true Enlightenment

So we do not reject the sense-data coming in nor do we trust it to be 100% accurate. Nor do we turn away from the power of the mind to perceive, analyze and conceive higher and higher approximations to the reality of existence, as exemplified by the revolutions in the science of physics, and indeed the teachings of Buddhism. But, like chasing the rainbow, the closer we come to capturing it, the more it exceeds our grasp. However, we should not be discouraged and give up the quest.

In the dyads subsumed under the conceptual power of the mind I include the classic formulation of form versus emptiness, the translation of rupa and shunyatta into English. As in most cases, something is lost in translation, but fortunately we are not totally dependent upon words or language, but rely on our own experience in meditation to embrace the reality that these terms are pointing to. Form is the actual appearance of reality that we are all familiar with in our own awareness; emptiness is the underlying dynamic of ever-changing morphology. The essential nature of the material world is its immateriality.

Nihilism and eternalism are likewise traditional dualities debated in the history of, and probably predate, Buddhism. Either standpoint, that nothing exists but delusion or illusion, or that anything is eternally existent, as a worldview, is considered an extreme position that ignores “the rest of the story” so to say. Buddhism lands somewhere in the middle, holding that those things that seem permanent are actually changing, if at different frequencies, and that the absolute nonexistence of anything is a state of denial.

This is succinctly addressed earlier in the same Ch’an poem:

To deny the reality of things is to miss their reality
To assert the emptiness of things is to miss their reality

Further, to assert the absolute existence of things is to miss their reality. Things exist, but by virtue of emptiness. They arise, abide, change and decay. The abiding part is the mystery, the delusion. But that all things are impermanent can be argued as the proof of permanence. The aggregate condition of ever-changing causes is a permanent condition of change. From the same poem, toward the end:

Emptiness here Emptiness there
but the infinite universe stands always before your eyes
Infinitely large and infinitely small
no difference for definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen
So too with Being and non-Being

“Being and non-being” is another phrasing of absolutes as extreme assertions about reality. But if “definitions have vanished and no boundaries are seen,” the apparent separation of being and non-being comes under scrutiny. The antipode to this idea is that everything that exists now always has and always will, just not in the same configuration.

As the poem moves toward conclusion, Master Sengcan assures us:

To live in this faith is the road to nonduality
because the nondual is one with the trusting mind

So from everyday dualities such as proposed separation of body and mind, self and other, the analysis proceeds to consider the meta-binary of nonduality as opposed to duality itself, as such. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “There is no dichotomy in Zen.” Then where is the dichotomy? Are duality and non-duality simply concepts, generated by a fevered mind? Or are they general principles, extracted from particular case experiences, the very essence of intelligence applying the empirical method?

In the next segment we will entertain our last experiment with the tetrad analysis model, taking a closer look at what it reveals about the relationships between the four spheres of influence introduced in an earlier section as nesting spheres, as illustrated here. We will explore some of the relationships between the personal, social, natural, and universal spheres which, as a concentric model, paint a picture of proximate and distant surrounding causes and conditions of our existence, and the comprehensive context for our Zen practice.