Liberation Within Obstruction

Kynan Sutherland Sensei

Liberation Within Obstruction

Kynan Sutherland Sensei (2020)

Tonight I want to explore our new sutra, “Liberation Within Obstruction”.

The title itself is provocative. What kind of liberation are we talking about here? And what do we mean by obstruction?

Well, it goes without saying that liberation is only be experienced right where you are, in this very body. Where else would liberation be possible? On a tropical island without you present?

The steady practice of zazen reveals that this body is liberation itself. Nothing obstructs it. Obstruction is not even a thing until we resist this liberation, this body, this place. But zazen reveals how irresistible this body is. We long for it; it longs for us. So in the deepest sense, our practice is bow to this longing, a vow to wake up to this wobbly life by stepping into every moment of our life.

As we say in the Great Vows,

Dharma gates are countless, 

I vow to walk through them.

This is leaving the world or preferences behind and stepping right into the heart of “I don’t know.”

Last night we met Zhaozhou, who was asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature or not?” In response he said, “Mu”, the one syllable that if taken to heart, unlocks our heart. On another occasion he was asked the same question, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature or not?” and he replied, “The door of every house leads to the capital.”

This is the door of every moment, every breath, every situation—which leads only to the capital.

The capital Zhaozhou is talking about here isn’t any fixed point on a map. It’s where we already are: vast, fluid and open in all directions.

So what are your doors? What is your house? And how do we discover our freedom within circumstances?

*

Luckily, we have a sutra for that! It’s called Liberation within Obstruction.

The sutra opens, appropriately, with a vow, to acknowledge our immediate affinity with all beings:

In the presence of Sangha, 

in the light of Dharma, 

in oneness with Buddha – 

may my path to realization

benefit all beings!

This is the bodhisattva path of turning with others, and turning things around to reveal your own self nature. 

In zazen, we relinquish our fixed impressions and interpretations of the world and fall back into that which is naturally shared.

I’m reminded of the poet AR Ammons when he decided one day to step through his own front door to see Corson’s inlet. He found himself wandering at random, experiencing a kind of gradual easing of thought, where he was slowly:

released from forms,   

from the perpendiculars,

      straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends   

               of sight:

I love this. His very language softens with every step. 

He even goes on to describe “the overall wandering of mirroring mind”, a very Zen-like statement!

This is the mind that lets the world in, just as it is, before thought. It is a kind of ripening of original mind, just as the sutra describes:

In this passing moment karma ripens 

and all things come to be.

I vow to affirm what is:

“Affirming what is” is placing your feet in the capital. It is, as AR Ammons says,

to accept   

the becoming

…, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish   

         no walls:

But this easy when we’re walking along the beach at ease. What about when things get tougher? Or hotter? Or colder? Or fiercer? How do we find liberation within obstruction then?

*

Well, by choosing to embrace whatever comes wholeheartedly. As the sutra says:

If there’s cost, I choose to pay.

If there’s need, I choose to give.

If there’s pain, I choose to feel.

If there’s sorrow, I choose to grieve.

This cascade of wonderfully human experience goes on, touching heat, peace, hunger, joy, burdens, life-and-death, choosing them all completely, choosing to turn with them, finally announcing that:

Where this takes me, I choose to go.

So what is the nature of this choosing? And what is it like to choose what might usually describe as “suffering”?

*

Let’s take grief, for example. I believe that we are, in our own way, all grieving right now. It may be acute, it may be barely registered, but we have all lost things or people or places or ways of doing things that we love.

We’ve been shaken to the core this year by devastating bushfires, coronavirus, political treachery here and overseas, the obliteration of sacred sites, systemic racism, lockdown — all of these have destabilised any sense of ‘normal’ — even with our so-called ‘covid-normal Christmas’ on the horizon.

So with so much lost, we can turn again to the sutra:

If there’s sorrow, I choose to grieve…

There’s nothing rash about grief. Indeed, grieving openly is a great wisdom. There is a big difference between grief and grievances, as Robert Frost noted: “Grievances are a form of impatience. Griefs are a form of patience.” 

To grieve is to stay with what is happening. That is Kshanti, the practice of patience, one of our paramitas. Indeed, it is the ability to stay with opens the Way. As the sutra says:

Being with what is, I respond to what is.

*

In one of the most extraordinary chapters of his extraordinary book, “Life and Fate”, Vasilly Grossman allows us to read a letter from a mother writing to her son. It’s WW2, the mother has just been herded into a camp for the crime of being Jewish. She says:

Vitya, I’m certain this letter will reach you, even though I’m now behind the German front line, behind the barbed wire of the Jewish ghetto. I won’t receive your answer, though; I won’t be here to receive it. I want you to know about my last days. Like that, it will be easier for me to die.

These are cruellest walls imaginable. The most disgusting kind of walls which even our government is prepared to erect for asylum seekers They begin in the mind but grow into things that are all too real. 

How is it possible to “be with what is, and respond to what is” in a situation like this?

The letter continues, describing how the mother was only allowed to take 15kg of belongings to the ghetto.

And so, Vityenka, I got ready. I took a pillow, some bedclothes, the cup you once gave me, a spoon, a knife and two forks. Do we really need so very much?

…I said goodbye to the house and garden. I sat for a few minutes under the tree. I said goodbye to the neighbours. Some people are very strange. Two women began arguing in front of me about which of them would have my chairs, and which my writing desk. I said good-bye and they both began to cry.

The letter continues in astonishing detail. It turns out that the woman is a nurse, and that once inside the ghetto she finds herself attending to the sick. There is nothing heroic or saintly about her actions — she is simply responding to circumstances, and says:

Sometimes I think it’s not so much me visiting the sick, as the other way round—that the people are a kind of doctor who is healing my soul. And how touching it is when people hand me an onion, a slice of bread, or a handful of beans.

And yet she knows everyone will die. She knows there is no escape. She has heard the stories and is clear-eyed about the fate of her and everyone else in the ghetto. So her letter, which leaves nothing out, comes to its end:

How can I finish this letter? Where can I find the strength, my son? Are there words capable of expressing my love for you? I kiss you, your eyes, your forehead, your hair.

 Remember that your mother’s love is always with you, in grief and in happiness, no one has the strength to destroy it. 

   Vityenka…this is the last line of your mother’s last letter to you. Live, live, live for ever…Mama.

Nothing is held back here, and no walls can be found. She has stepped through words, and her heart is broken open to unbounded love.

This is the love that can only sing, “live, live, live forever” — in this moment, in this body, in this place, in the heart of grief itself.

*

This is waking up from the dream of separation into the great, living dream of shared life.

I’ll share with you a dream I once had, a great dream.

A fire was coming. Flames could be seen in the bush, with black smoke. A mob of kangaroos were bounding away from the fire towards the river. I was running with them, running to escape the fires.

We all plunged into the river, a great cacophony and panic of kangaroos and me. The rapids were wild and intense, and the smoke mingled with the sound of the rushing water.

As we crossed, the river got deeper, as rivers do on one side where the current is strongest. As we pushed our way through I noticed that the kangaroo beside me could not touch the bottom and flailing, and instinctively I help on to it.

The miraculous thing for me was that I could feel, even in my dream, the exact quality of fur, the warmth of its body, and even more, I could feel its heart next to mine, beating as mine.

I could see both shores in the dream - the one with fire, and the one without. But in that moment there was no move to escape. The point was to be entirely with what was happening. To embrace what was happening. To choose it entirely. To be completely doused in the emergency.

Liberation within Obstruction says:

This life is as real as a dream; 

the one who knows it cannot be found;  

Indeed. With practice, we wake up from a small dream into a great dream. Nothing is permanent, nothing is fixed. But when we embrace this fact there is no “me” to be found, and only a single beating heart.

and truth is not a thing, 

therefore I vow

to choose this constant Dharma open gate!  

Clearly, any solid or unchanging ‘thing’ is not truth. Truth is never static. It flows. It is this constant dharma open gate!

*

Hsueh Tou puts it this way:

“A clear pool does not admit the blue dragon’s coils.”

You won’t find the dragon of flowing life in stagnant water. The blue dragon of enlightened action does not coil up there. 

Instead, it glints in running water, choppy water, calm water, melancholy water, laughing water, salty water.

You can recognise this dragon whenever you let it flick and ripple through your own body — the body that soars before thought, before interpretation, before opinions.

This is a very succinct way to describing the sutra. And I was moved to learn that the old teacher Wu Tsu said, “In Hsueh Tou’s whole volume of eulogies on the ancients, I just like the line, “A clear pool does not admit the blue dragon’s coils.”

*

So like the fish who becomes a dragon by swimming through the dragon gate, we become completely human when we walk right through our dharma gates.

This is a deeply human path.

It is a path of honouring our very human lives. 

It is a vow to walk on this earth and know that we are walking on this earth. To choose this moment completely and embody it fully.

We do this together. We wake up together. So I will round off this talk with the final words of the sutra Liberation within obstruction, which sing:

May all Buddhas and all beings

help me live this vow.

This article was first offered as a talk to the Melbourne Zen Group in November 2020