Notes on a talk made by Michael Stone during a month-long workshop at Centre of Gravity, July 29, 2010
Questions
TKV Desikichar told his partner Menaka that he longed to go away and study, and immerse himself in practice. She replied, “If you can’t do your practice here in the world, what good is your yoga?”
We’ve translated this text (Genjōkōan/Actualizing the Fundamental Point) by Dogen as the koan of your whole life. It’s about actualizing your life, and practicing to find out what’s important.
Dogen was someone who lost both his parents by the age of eight, so there was urgency in his practice. Dogen had two main motivations, the first took shape as a question. If everyone is already enlightened, or has Buddha nature, if this quality is inherently within us, then why practice? What is the purpose of practice? The second motivating for Dogen is that practice is always so focused on one’s realization, so for Dogen it was equally important to take your realization and express it in your life, your body, in speech and mind. He did this in so many ways, through his generosity in his teaching, finding ways of using language to make it alive again, taking images that had become clichés, like enlightenment equals the moon floating in the sky, and reworking these clichés until they become alive again.
Practice
What interests me about us practicing together over the long haul is that it’s not enough just to have your private individual realization. You can’t just go on retreat and have experiences of oneness and interconnectedness and think that the practice ends there. We have to continually take our realization out into the world. Through our conduct, how we walk, how we bank, how we consume, or speak with our friends and family. We can only do this through attentiveness. Through paying attention to the way things really are. Because you don’t know how you’re going to serve in a year or in three years. Our lives change really fast. You don’t know what you’re going to be asked to do in six years. You don’t know what your life is going to look like. How can you practice in a way now, so that there’s something real going on, so that when you’re asked to meet your life or the needs of others, you can really do it, so that practice is not just a shell of form. And secondly, there are people around us who are also practicing. We start to learn about their practice, so we can see how their practice is being expressed in their work and their world. This is what Dogen is trying to hone in on in the last section. OK, you’re practicing, now what are you going to do with it?
On retreat when people have special experiences they can get really excited. Oh yes, I am a very mystical person. My first question is always: how are you going to let it go? And then: What are you going to do with it?
Compassion
Dogen points to two other themes. One is to recognize, value and love our own uniqueness and idiosyncrasies. The fact that we’re an oddity. Have you seen Erin’s hair? Nobody has hair like this, it goes in every direction. She’s an oddball. And so we can love her, because we can recognize her singularity. Secondly, we can cherish our own idiosyncracies, but also see them against a larger pattern of interconnectedness and contingency and impermanence. It’s out of that recognition that compassion arises. Compassion arises by itself from these strange habits that we’ve inherited and that sometimes we’ve invented. How to extend that compassion to ourselves and to others? Because you can’t really look after others if you’re not looking after yourself. Just when you think you’re taking good care of someone else, you realize if you took even better care of yourself you could take even better care of someone else.
Dogen writes, “A fish swims in the ocean, and no matter how far it swims there is no end to the water.” Practice is like this, isn’t it? No matter how far or deep we practice there’s no end to it. In another text, Dogen also says you don’t practice to get enlightened, you practice because you are enlightened. He flips it on his head. No matter how deep you go in your practice, it’s like a fish swimming in the ocean. The fish never finds the end of the ocean. Suzuki Roshi used to joke that if people were told that if you just practice for two years you’d wake up, the zendos would be full. But what happens is they come and then the teacher says now you have to do this for the rest of your life. As soon as this is said out loud, half the audience leaves.
Nurture the Skin Bag
What nurtures you the way water nurtures a fish? What nurtures you the way wind nurtures a bird? This is what Dogen is asking. What is your field? For a fish it’s the sea, or a river, it’s water. And for a bird it’s air, wind and currents. In the yoga postures and the pranayama practice we practice with the winds also. We practice with the pranic pattern of inhaling and the upanic pattern of exhaling, the samanic pattern of spreading the kidneys as we inhale and feel the navel drop back to the spine as we exhale. The udonic pattern of releasing the lower jaw on the exhale, and feeling the roof of the mouth float up on the inhale. And the vyanic pattern of letting the breath flow everywhere, in and out.
We also are nurtured by water. The way we take care of water is how we take care of our body. We need to take care of water, like we take care of our body. You can find all these elements in how we nurture ourselves. But don’t think that nurturing yourself is nurturing just this skin bag. Nurturing yourself means taking care of everything that nurtures the skin bag. And everything that nurtures what nurtures you. And in taking care of everything that nurtures that nurtures you, you nurture yourself.
Some people ask “I walk down University Avenue during the weekend of the G20 and what does this really do? Does this really do anything?” But actually you watch people at the end of the day, marching with other people for what they believe in, and they’re invigorated, they’re alive. To be alive is to feel how some of what we do makes no difference, and how some of what we do makes a difference. But how everything we do, every action we take really matters. Everything matters. Maybe we don’t see the difference right away. Maybe the newspaper doesn’t report the day the way we saw it happen. But everything we do really matters. Especially when we do it together. So consider how unrestrained the movement of a fish is. How unrestrained the movement of a finch is. Or a hummingbird. If you blur your eyes you can turn the police into hummingbirds.
“A bird flies in the sky, and no matter how far it flies there is no end to the air. However, the fish and the bird have never left their elements.” Dogen
Do you ever leave your element? Do you know what nurtures you? Do you know what your field is? And then even though you know it, you leave it. This is also known as co-dependent relationships. Or perhaps you know what you need, but you don’t pay attention to this knowing. You know what you need, you know what nurtures you, but you don’t pay attention to it. And then as Carl Jung says everything that’s repressed comes back into consciousness with the same amount of energy that it took to repress it. We leave things out of our relationships, or our movement vocabulary, or our minds. We refuse, we split off, and the energy it takes to keep things at bay, which is a lot, is the same amount of energy it will use to force itself back into awareness.
We don’t want to lose track of what nourishes us. That’s why we make pilgrimages inside our bodies, to the pelvic floor, for instance, and in our relationships.
“When their activity is large their field is large. When their need is small their field is small.” Dogen
Small Field
I spent six months living in a Volkswagen van in Algonquin Park. This tow truck I met was really into the fact that I lived there. He used to bring me groceries when he drove through highway 60. I never knew when he would arrive, but he came every couple of days. I was on a reverse schedule because it was spring. I couldn’t sleep at night because it was so cold. So I stayed up at night, and slept during the day. I just listened. All day my main practice was listening to the sound of the lakes thawing. It sounds exactly like thunder. For six months my field was so small, I didn’t go more than half a kilometer away from my van. That might sound small, but there’s no landscape I know better. And I saw two or three seasons of pine cones that I could distinguish from each other that I would never be able to do if I was just driving by watching the landscape out the window.
Breath
When our field is small… There’s a pause at the end of your exhale, and we can watch, and feel the pelvic floor spread out, then the centre of the pelvic floor start to rise, and the inhale come out of nowhere, and sweeps the end of the exhale up through the heart. There’s a whole universe there. You can watch this on National Geographic films. You look so closely at any one thing and in it you find everything. When your field is large, that’s what you work with. And when your field is small, that’s what you work with. When your need is large, that’s what you work with. And vice versa.
Thus the bird and the fish totally cover their full range, and totally experience their lives. No bird wants to be in the fish realm. And no fish that we know of wants to be in a bird realm. There are some birds that seem to want to become fish, but they’re not, they’re birds. And there are a few fish… I remember living in Mexico for a month in a house right on the water watching the whales dive. The energy it takes for whales to dive is immense, and as they drop down into the water there’s something almost like a smile on their faces. Can you imagine what it’s like to be as heavy as a whale and to be headed downward back towards the water? That’s amazing. I don’t think the whale was saying I want to be a bird. It was just covering its field. What is a fish? Swimming. What is a bird? Flying. What is a sentient being? What are you? What’s Rose? Rose-ing. What’s Ronit? Ronit-ing. What’s Grant? Grant-ing. Did you catch that? Is that a homophone or a homonym? A homonym.
What is a sentient being? It’s being in your life. And as we’ve talked about throughout this month, nothing obstructs our life more, or keeps us from being fully in our life, than imagining that realization is outside of you. There’s nothing that stops us more than a paradigm of transcendence that places transcendence separate from your life. What a shame when we go through our practice and we can’t see that realization is the moon being nestled even by the smallest dew drop. And what is your life? You can only answer that question if you know what nourishes you. If you don’t know what nourishes, you can’t know what your life is. Because we’re in someone else’s light. Krishna says this to Arnjuna. He says, “Do your dharma.” Don’t do someone else’s dharma. Do your dharma. We should say this to half the people in medical school and law school. Do your dharma, not your parent’s unlived life. There’s this phenomena in the Yoga community of people who start practicing and they quit their job. They start practicing, they start getting in touch with their life again, and then they can’t go on with the same old and their body melts into a puddle of licorice ice cream and they have to leave because even their children are tired of that flavour. It’s amazing. John Cage says wouldn’t it be amazing if the unemployment rate rose so high that people would do what they’re supposed to do.
John Cage said, “The other thing that newspapers have headlines about is unemployment, because it’s going up very high. Instead of being seen as the nature of the future, unemployment is seen as some horror. None of the jobs that anyone is offered are of any interest. No one wants a job. What everyone needs in order to do their best work is, as you know very well now, self-employment. Here we are almost halfway towards self-employment, and all we do is complain about the fact that we have this big unemployment problem. It’s stupid. It’s as stupid as believing in God.”
What is your practice? Your practice is learning how to nourish yourself and to be in touch with the senses. Practice and non-clinging. That’s why there is no end to practice.
“Now if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird or fish will not find its way or its place. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. When you find your way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point; for the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past, and it is not merely arising now.”
Dogen’s been trying to find the answer to the question: why practice? And here is the answer. “When you find your place where you are…” Right where you are, practice occurs. You’re not going to find it in another country or another era. It’s right here, and we’re missing it and we’re missing it and we’re missing it. Everything becomes our practice. Everything is my life. Cancer is not my life! Anger is not my life! My temper is not my practice! I see this sometimes with parents who have young kids. The kids are not my practice, and they have to get nine babysitters so they can do their practice. This pain in my back is not my practice. Sadness is not my practice. My life… my life is when it’s all good. This other stuff’s not my practice. The years I lost in the hospital, in the prison, being unconscious, that’s not my life.
Breathing
You hear this so much, people who have to spend three years in bed with back pain, and are so angry about it. Why did I have to spend three years? And then a few days later they might say, “I wish I had a practice.” Because I wouldn’t have lost those three years, in pain, wanting to be somewhere else. I don’t think a fish loses years being somewhere else. To realize oneness with everything is to take a breath, shall we try this? Is anyone breathing? Is to take a breath right now, and to know that this breath is in continuity with every sentient being right now taking a breath. The squirrel, the fish in the lake, the red ants on the island, they’re all breathing with you right now. Is that amazing to consider, that these vayus that we’ve been exploring, are happening in every sentient being. These winds of breathing. Through all the kosas, they have anatomy, they have physiology, all these kosas are spread through the whole natural world. We’re all breathing together. It’s amazing to think about. No matter how far a fish swims, there’s no end to the water. There’s no end to the practice. And the practice, like water, is what sustains you. The practice, like air, is what sustains you, so you can turn around and express your practice and make art. So that you can find compassion to serve others, and passion to make art. And there’s no end to it. Totally covering your whole range means really knowing your realm.
Philip Whalen
Those of you who come to Centre of Gravity know we have on our altar a little photograph of Philip Whalen. I can’t go more than two days without reading his words. He has a little poem he wrote at the end of his life about covering one’s domain completely. Here’s one of the last poems he wrote. “Cherry trees will blossom every year, but I’ll disappear for good, one of these days.” Who know when you’re going to disappear? I don’t want you to disappear, I’ve just spent a month with you, I love you. You’re going to disappear at the end of the week. All the way to Bangkok, New York, Hong Kong, all the way to Dubai, Kitchener? All the way to Kitchener? Montreal, England, Stockholm, Copenhagen.
Sometimes in this practice I want to push you to see interconnectedness with your whole body, and sometimes I want to hug you and say relax, stop trying to find interconnectedness with your whole body. There’s a wonderful Chinese cabin phrase that I read on the New Year’s retreat, that still makes me laugh. It goes like this. “Duck legs are short, crane legs are long.” Some of you have short kind of stumpy legs. And then there’s Grant. Sixty degrees. In the Yoga tradition the saying goes, “Your elbow can only bend one way.” Your life is your life, you can’t live someone else’s. There’s someone who is a taxi driver and wakes up at six am, I see them every morning driving down my street at the same hour. That is their pattern. There is the women at the beer store at 6:50 feeding pigeons. That is her ocean. Cherry blossoms might fall, but they come back again. Your life sometimes falls apart and comes back again, but you just get to be here this time. In this way, this month, with these friends. We will not get to do this the same way again. And if we come back to the intensive in two years, you’ll look back and say it was a golden era. And some of you are here saying do you remember when there was just a dozen of us in the alley? And when we were in the alley, do you remember when there was just a half dozen of us in the park? We don’t want to lose track of what nourishes us, and that’s why we make these pilgrimages in our body and in our relationships and in community.
In January I made a pilgrimage to where Philip Whalen lived. I got to go to his house where he passed away many years ago. All his books are still there. Handwritten letters by Gary Snider are tucked in his books. It’s all just as he left it. They didn’t even know they had an archive there. And I didn’t know him, I never knew him when he was alive, but when I was there it invigorated me, it reminded me of why we practice. Why it’s so important to express ourselves. Why making art is the most important thing. This does not mean painting or sculpture. It also means that we don’t get to do whatever we want. Fishes don’t, it might seem like they get to do whatever they want, but they don’t. Everyone here at the intensive has a job. Somebody has to cook, and there’s a particular way you cook. Somebody has to ring the bell. Ronit learned this, and there’s a particular way you ring the bell. The first day she rang the bell it was kind of startling. Now she can ring the bell. The first day Lori lit the incense she blew on the incense and blew the altar apart. There’s a particular way you take the flame off of the incense. Just because you’re free doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. I think being in community reminds us of this. You can’t just do whatever you want.
Robert Aitken writes, “Everything just as it is, as is. Flowers in bloom, nothing to add.” Nothing to add. A bird is life, fish is life. Nothing to add. Hakuin says, in his commentary on the Heart Sutra, “What a shame it is when you try drawing a snake and you add a leg.” Have you ever done this? You draw a beautiful snake but you’re not attentive so you wind up adding a leg. What a shame to add the leg, to add something. Soen Roshi wrote, “All beings are flowers. Blooming in a blooming universe.” That’s you, that’s Lena blooming in the only way that Lena can bloom. You saw Erin’s hair. Did you see Lena’s hair? It’s almost like Erin’s hair, but it’s not the same. Erin’s hair will never be Lena’s hair. And her hair is hair-ing, in a blooming universe.
So now Dogen is going to float this whole thing, and he’s going to give us a koan. He doesn’t like koans too much. But I want our attention to be really sparkly, so I’d like to take a break, he gives you a koan to actualize his koan, like a flower blooming.
You want to pour your life into your practice so that the practice gets everything wet. It cools when it needs to, adds heat when needed, nourishes when needed.
You become more helpful when you practice. And in order to become more helpful, you need to rely on yourself. And to know what nourishes you.
We have to live in our field and in our domain. Being a fish means leading a risky life. How often do we take the easy way in order to please an idea or image we have internalized, about body image, or career?