The Old Mirror
Kynan Sutherland Sensei
The Old Mirror
Kynan Sutherland Sensei (2018)
Tonight I want to gaze deeper into the dark of not-knowing with the help of what is sometimes called “The Old Mirror.” This is an image that shines right through our sutras, stories, koans and teachings. We are looking into this mirror all the time, of course. But this is particularly so in sesshin, where round after round, moment after moment, we stare into the mirror and discover ourselves reflected back naturally in everything we do.
So what is the old mirror? Who is the old mirror? How do we see it? And how does the old mirror to see us?’
Let’s invite a few friends along to help us explore these questions. And who better than Dongshan and Caoshan, the master and disciple who gave birth to the Caodong School of Zen (known as the Soto in Japanese). Dongshan Liangjie might be familiar to you from our sutras - we recite his name in the long list of dedications. Caoshan may be less so, but he was a brilliant student of Dongshan’s and the inspiration behind many of our most treasured koans. In fact, the word Soto is a blend of their two names: So comes from Caoshan and ‘To’ from Dongshan. I love the way their names are mixed up here: the student Caoshan is placed before Dongshan — it is SOTO not TOSO. How wonderful! I love the way these two syllables reflect one another, mirror each other, beyond rank or heirarchy.
The Old Mirror also transcends time, looking right through past, present and future to reveal how past, present and future reflect one another at every point. Remember that the Old Mirror can also be translated as ‘ancient’ or ‘eternal’, which could also be rendered ‘seamless’. It cannot find a dividing line between Dongshan and Caoshan, you or me, past, present or future.
So Dongshan and Caoshan realise the Old Mirror together. In fact, there’s no other way. The heart of our practice is this “no other”, and to step freely into the liberation of that fact. We cannot look into the old mirror alone. But when we do, Donshan and Caoshan are smiling with us.
In celebration of this fact, Dongshan transmitted a poem in secret to Caoshan called The Jewel Mirror Samadhi. Happily it remains an open secret, available in every breath and moment of our lives. And happier still, it was transmitted in verse from Caoshan to his disciples. Some of you will be familiar with it already. It used to be in our sutra books, but mysteriously vanished a few years ago, only to return in a fresh translation, just like the breath and every moment of our lives.
I don’t want to look at the whole thing, but it opens like this:
The dharma of suchness
directly transmitted by Buddhas and Patriarchs
Today is yours
preserve it carefully
What a marvellous fact. Today is yours — preserve it carefully. Isn’t that what sesshin is all about? Indeed, we take care of each day, each moment of each day, each turn of the door handle, each time we wash our bowls with our cloths, each time we stand with the bell. We take care of the day - the Great Day we are in. I love that we’re reminded from the very outset that the day is ‘yours’ already. We don’t have to go looking for it; it’s right here. Today is yours and when we preserve it, which we do in zazen, it becomes clearer and clearer and deeper and deeper and brighter and brighter.
All day long we are practice as the Old Mirror. We may not even realise we’re doing it, but by paying attention to each and every thing, in all its exquisite detail, we discover ourselves reflected in each and every thing. Dongshan says:
Form and reflections view each other
You are not him but he is clearly you.
These are beautiful, mysterious lines. They accurately describe the quality of sesshin mind, where it becomes harder and harder to say where one thing starts and another ends. Am I looking at the dishcloth, or is the dishcloth looking at me? I’m reminded of Shakyamuni when he glanced up and saw the morning star. In Zen we like to say that when he saw the morning star, the morning star saw him. There was no separation, no confusion, just Shakyamuni-star.
I imagine Coashan absorbing this verse and recognising that although he was clearly not Dongshan, Dongshan was clearly him. This recognition allowed Caoshan to spread Dongshan’s teaching throughout Tang China, down through the ages and across the world, right into this room. And he did so in an entirely original and creative way. Listen to this exchange from the Book of Serenity. You’ll hear that Caoshan is enjoying the Old Mirror with Elder De, without calling it by name.
Caoshan’s Dharma Body
(Book of Serenity, Case 52)
Caoshan asked Elder De, “The true Dharma Body is like the empty sky. It manifests the form of itself as the moon reflects on the water. How do you explain the way it corresponds?”
Elder De said, “It is like a donkey sees a well.”
Caoshan said, “That is nicely expressed but it is only 80 percent.”
Elder De said, “What about you, Acharya?”
Caoshan said, "It is like a well sees a donkey.”
A fascinating case. Let’s start with Elder De. He’s one of those wonderful characters who materialise out of the blue only to vanish into thin air. We know nothing about Elder De beyond this one encounter. He appears, lights up the Way, then disappears. Caoshan wastes no time in opening up the Way. He fires a question at the mysterious Elder De: “The true dharma body is like the empty sky. It manifests the form of itself as the moon reflects on the water. How do you explain the way it corresponds?” In other words, how is emptiness reflected in form? This is the question we are looking at tonight. And Elder De doesn’t miss a beat. He says, “It is like a donkey sees a well.”
What a splendid response! I don’t know about you, but it’s not what I would have said. Elder De is quite a monk! He catches us by surprise but in a brilliant way. Because after all, we’re just like donkeys, aren’t we? Rough, clunky, bumbling, interesting. And we all share that animal thirst for the water of emptiness, the cool, dark water that is perfectly clear and still, reflecting the entire world. This is the water we encounter whenever we let the blizzards of thought and distraction settle and become luminous. It’s then that we finally catch sight of our original face, the one we had before even our parents were born.
Kevin Hart has a wonderful thing to say about this in his poem “Dark One.”
You’re here as well, Dark One, so where’s
your hidey hole?
Don’t miss the word play here. “You’re here as well” doesn’t just mean that the dark water is with us at all times, but that it is the well itself. You’re here as well. We exist as this well. If we open our eyes, there is only well-water.
In answer to his own question, “You’re here as well, Dark one, so where’s / your hidey hole?” He goes on to say:
The kettle’s hiss,
My daughter’s drawing of our cat,
That crumbling wasp nest by the door?
He poses these as possibilities, but the well water is all of these things. The frogs singing right now. Each particular face in this room. The patterns of this carpet in the lamplight. The hidey hole he’s talking about has nowhere to hide.
Back to Caoshan. He’s clearly delighted by Elder De’s response, and says, “Hmmm, that was nicely expressed, but it is only 80 percent.” Which I believe is a B+ in most universities and high schools. He’s a hard marker!. A hard marker for a good reason. Because he’s telling us that we can never wrap this matter up. Eighty percent is the whole. We can never have the last word when it comes to life, when it comes to the unfolding of each thing. How could we even dream of summarising life in even the most exquisite expression.
So Elder De — I imagine him bowing here — says, “What about you, Acharya?” This is a beautiful moment. When we hear this word — Acharya — we know that Elder De is appealing to the oldest, deepest, most awake dimension of Caoshan, and all of us. He’s bowing to the Old Mirror, which says without missing a beat, “It is like a well sees a donkey.”
This is sublime. Because the more we see of this darkness, the darkness that is beyond deep, the more we realise it is not Us who sees the darkness. But rather the darkness that sees us.
This is the fundamental turn of Zen practice. Initially we take the path of Zen, and then realise that the path of Zen has taken us. Or that we do not discover the Way; the way discovers us. Or that what we have been thirsting for all along in that well has actually been thirsting for us.
To make this turn means forgetting what we thought we knew and submitting to what actually is. This demands a discipline of not-knowing, which isn’t some sort of dumb, blank space, but something more like what the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski has in mind when he eulogised his mentor Czapski:
As a thinking person, Czapski belonged to that rare breed of artists who though they battle and believe and doubt, and care passionately, at life’s end, still do not know.
He continues:
This wasn’t an ‘I don’t know’ arising from laziness, depression, negativity or agnosticism. This ‘I don’t know’ of Czapski’s was positive, inspired, intelligent.
I love this. It’s a beautiful description of zazen: open, inspired, intelligent. To really really penetrate the mysteries of this world, of life and death, we must be curious, or allow ourselves to be as curious as child.
I can’t resist sharing a homegrown koan that features my son, Hamish. I’ve called it ‘Hamish’s Unimaginable’:
One day I was driving up the mountains to go rock scrambling with my son Hamish who is 8 years old. Out of the blue he said, ‘You can’t actually imagine death.’
“It’s amazing isn’t it,” I said.
Hamish fell silent for a while, then said, ‘And we can’t imaging life either. We can see it, but we can’t imagine it.’
Surely Caoshan would have given this 85 percent, or even 90 percent! It’s open, inspired, intelligent. And points directly to the kind of experience we relish in Zen. We can see everything that is going on right now — but can we know it? Isn’t the immediacy of life unimaginable?
There is a beautiful story in Dogen’s fascicle The Old Mirror that touches on this. In it mentions, almost in passing, a story about the 18th Zen ancestor Kayashata, which goes like this:
When Kayashata was born he was born together with a mirror and wherever he went the mirror would go too. If he lay down, the mirror would lie down, if he sat up the mirror would sit up too. If he went to the garden, the mirror would be there as well.
Dogen says, ‘All Buddhas from the past, present and future could be seen in Kayshata’s mirror. Every aspect of heavenly and human affairs was clearly reflected in the mirror. The mirror could reveal any teaching ancient or current, more clearly than the scriptures.’
Just as these frogs reveal the mirror more clearly than the scriptures. However, there was twist. Dogen tells us that, ‘when the boy left home and received the precepts, the mirror disappeared.’ Why? Where did it go? Why would receiving the precepts, taking refuge in the Way, cause the mirror to vanish?
Because when the mirror is gone, we no longer see each other, or are reflected in each other, but become each other. This is true meeting. As Lingyun says in another exchange (Entangling Vines 14), ‘Smash the mirror then you and I can meet.’
We must do this. If we cannot recognise our true selves in each and every thing from degraded forests, degraded people, the broken sea — we thought we couldn’t break it, but we just about have, we have just about broken the sea — in all the trampled values, debased hearts and minds, all of the most vexing and troubling dimensions of life, if we can’t recognise ourselves as those things, then how can we save them?
Our practice of open, intelligent and inspired communion is vital. We are not just reflected in these difficulties, we don’t just see them. We are them. Even just to remove ourselves ever so subtly from such things — to put ourselves behind even the thinnest veil of glass, at even the slightest remove — is to betray the world, as cruel and uncompromising and incredible as the world is. So smash the mirror. Because only then can we return, as Kayashata does, to the crisp immediacy of everyday life.
I will leave you with a poem that expresses this in a light but deeply felt way. It’s by a Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki:
In the morning
After taking cold shower
—-what a mistake—-
I look at the mirror.
There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
—-what a pity—-
Poor, dirty, old man,
He is not me, absolutely not.
Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in the mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war—
I’ll never be tired of life.
Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.
Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.”
***********************
ZEN OPEN CIRCLE
SPRING SESSHIN 2018
CLOUD MOUNTAIN, NSW,
KYNAN SUTHERLAND
EDITED OUT
All of which is bundled together in this lovely, humble I love old. It is so familiar and human. We grow old. It is also mysterious, dark and mysterious, a play on this word ‘old’- old beyond our reckoning, old beyond time.
The Old Mirror
Spring Sesshin 2018
Kynan Sutherland
Over the last days and nights of this sesshin, Susan has been exploring this matter of looking into the dark of not knowing, dark of not knowing. So tonight I want to continue with this theme and take up an image that pulses through our sutras, through our tradition and many of the teachings, an image that is just as mysterious as this dark. That image is of what in Zen is called the old mirror, the old mirror.
We are looking into this old mirror all the time, all day long without fail, the old mirror shining bright, everything we have seen, everything we do. I think that is particularly the case when we are gathered here together at sesshin. When we sit round after round, moment by moment with one another, reflecting one another and we do this with the genuineness and sincerity that we do. The old mirror becomes an exquisite image for what this practice is.
One thing that the image of the old mirror does, it asks us to look into form and emptiness and the way these two perfectly reflect and reveal one another. Tonight I want to take up this question, what is the old mirror? This image that we constantly encounter in this tradition, what is the old mirror? Who is the old mirror? How do we see it? More to the point, how do we allow the old mirror to see us?
Setting out on this journey into the dark, I want bring a few travelling companions along. They will be initially Dongshan and his student and dharma heir, Caoshan. Dongshan Liangjie we recite in our sutra dedication, Dongshan and his disciple, Caoshan. These two men are famous because their combined names create what we know of, as Soto. The So from Caoshan and the ‘to’ from ‘T/Dong’ of Dongshan. I love the way there is a mix up in the name of Soto, if we can call it a mix up, upside down. We have Caoshan coming before Dongshan SOTO not TOSO. I love this, how these two syllables reflect one another, each man is reflected by the other in a way that transcends time. Past, present and future. It certainly transcends rank. We all know here, we are all people of no rank. The old mirror has no rank. I love that it is called old, this mirror. Sometimes it is translated as ‘ancient’. It could be translated as ‘eternal’ or ‘seamless’ perhaps. I love old. It is so familiar and human. We grow old. It is also mysterious, dark and mysterious, a play on this word ‘old’- old beyond our reckoning, old beyond time.
This old mirror that Dongshan loved so much, that one of his gifts to Caoshan, said to be transmitted in secret, was this poem called The Jewel Mirror Samadhi. Many people here would be familiar with it already. It used to be in our sutra books but it has vanished. I don’t want to touch on all of it, but take a few soundings from some places in it-
This Jewel Mirror Samadhi verse is one of the central inspirations for this mirror image
The dharma of suchness
directly transmitted by Buddhas and Patriarchs
Today is yours
preserve it carefully
I love this line- Today is yours, preserve it carefully. Isn’t that what sesshin is all about? We take care of the day, every moment of the day, each turn, each flow, each trick, each washing of the bowl, each standing up when the bell rings. There is a taking care of the day, preserving of today. This great day we are in. I love that this poem is also saying, right from the outset, it is yours already. You don’t have to go looking for it, it is right here. Today is yours and when we preserve it, which we do in zazen, it becomes clearer and clearer and deeper and deeper and brighter and brighter. All day long we are practising as this old mirror. It is so interesting, that is what we are doing even when we don’t realise that is what we are doing. There are plenty of times that we don’t, but actually we are without fail, practising as this old mirror. Further on in the verse he picks up a very interesting ..???…He is talking about practice here-
It is like gazing into a jewel mirror - our practice, like gazing into a jewel mirror. Form and reflections view each other
You are not him but he is clearly you.
These are beautiful, mysterious lines. They remind me of our foundational story of Shakyamuni seeing the morning star after a sustained evening of zazen. It is said that when he happened to glance up and see the morning star, the morning star saw him. These two that are not two, saw each other. Completely distinct star and Shakyamuni but not separate. That is what the verse is trying to convey here when it says ‘you are not him but he is clearly you’. I am not Lizzie, but Lizzie is clearly me ???????? and Mary
Keizan, who we know from inspiring the title of this sesshin, The Moon of Mind, the Flower of I/Eyes. He has a note about this in The Transmission of the Light. He says, The so-called I when Shakyamuni says ‘I am not the star but the star is clearly me’, this so called I is not Shakyamuni and yet Shakyamuni comes from this ‘I’. Not only does Shakyamuni come from it, but the great earth and many beings also come from it. This reminds me of Dogen’s famous lines I came to see that mind is no other than the mountains, the rivers, the great earth, the sun and the moon and the stars. The entire world coming from this I. This I that is not me, it is not you, it is not Shakyamuni, it is not the star. It is the old mirror.
You can imagine Caoshan, his disciple, absorbing all this from the verse of Dongshan. Caoshan goes on to become one to the most significant teachers. In fact he is known as, I hate to use the word ‘populariser’, but he took Dongshan’s teaching and spread it into the world, shared it with many many people and it comes right down to us now.
Caoshan has a beautiful case which conveys this Jewel Mirror Samadhi without mentioning it explicitly. When I read it out, you will be able to hear this old mirror in the words. It is from the Book of Serenity, case 52.
Caoshan’s Dharma Body
Caoshan asked Elder De-
The true Dharma Body is like the empty sky. It manifests the form of itself as the moon reflects on the water. How do you explain the way it corresponds?
Elder De said, It is like a donkey sees a well. Caoshan said, That is nicely expressed but it is only 80%. Elder De said, What about you, Acharya? Caoshan said, It is like a well sees a donkey.
A fascinating case. Let’s start with Elder De. He is one of these great characters that I love, that appear in the record, never to appear again. They just come in and light the place up for a little while and then vanish, just like everything else in life. I love that Caoshan wastes no time. Here comes this interesting elder into his monastery and we can see Caoshan goes, Right! Let’s clap hands and get to work. This first question that Caoshan opens with – The true dharma body is like the empty sky. It manifests the form of itself as the moon reflects on the water. How do you explain the way it corresponds? Caoshan is asking something like - What is the relationship between form and emptiness? How do they reflect one another? This is the question we are looking into tonight. Elder De doesn’t miss a beat. He says, It is like a donkey sees a well.
This is not what I would have come up with, if I had just been asked to summarise the entire Way of Zen and Buddhism. It is splendid. It is exactly to the point, actually, because we are donkeys, even on the most simple, human level, the clunky, interesting and bumbling, human. We are not stallions, we are donkeys. This donkey sees the well. A donkey sees a well. This is what zazen is. We are staring into this well all the time. It is what we thirst for in this world. It is what the donkey in us thirsts for. We stare into this well even when blizzards of thought, confusion and distraction and all these things come flying at us, which they do, time and time again. I’m sure each of us this deep into sesshin, I’m sure we have all experienced that deep settling into the staring into that well, into the darkness of that well. It is a darkness and a deepness that is oddly familiar when we settle into it. It is not a frightening thing, to look into that dark space. It is somehow us and we know it.
I love what one of our national treasures, I think he lives overseas, Kevin Hart, the Australian poet. He says a beautiful thing that is related to the point in the case, in one of his poems.
You’re here as well, Dark One, so where’s
your hidey hole?
Don’t miss the word play here, You’re here as well, as the well, Dark One, so where’s your hidey hole? And then, as if to answer himself with another question, he says
The kettle’s hiss,
My daughter’s drawing of our cat,
That crumbling wasp nest by the door?
I think it is in all of those things. These frogs singing us a treat tonight. Each of the faces being in this room. The hidey hole that he is talking about there actually has nowhere to hide. It is in the pattern in this carpet and the shadows flicking across the floor. The hidey hole has nowhere to hide.
Caoshan, listening to this, the donkey sees a well, is clearly delighted. He says, Hmm that was nicely expressed, but it is only 80%, which I think is a B+. He is a hard marker, Caoshan. A hard marker for a reason. He is putting into play that we can never wrap this matter up, with just a few words. We can never have the last word when it comes to life, when it comes to the unfolding of each thing. How can we even dream of summarising it in some complete way. So Elder De, I imagine him bowing here, says, What about you, Acharya? That is beautiful- acharya. When we hear this, acharya, that is the deepest oldest, most awake part in each of us. Acharya. When he uses that word, he is bowing to the Old Mirror in Caoshan. The Old Mirror says, It is like a well sees a donkey. Which is sublime, because the more we see of this darkness, this darkness that is beyond deep, the more we realise it is not Us who sees this darkness. But rather the darkness sees us.
This is the fundamental term this practice offers us, that we take the Zen path because it offers us a turning. This turning, it is the turning when we realise we don’t discover the Way, the Way discovers us. How do we practise with making room for that opportunity. We do what we have been discussing, all these days and nights. We practise the art of not knowing. I think it is important to remind ourselves that this not-knowing is not some sort of dumb, blank space. It is not a blurry ignorant, fuzzy state of mind. It is more like what the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who I love, a lovely heart and mind. He says, in reference to a mentor of his, a painter, called Czapski in Poland, a very dear friend of Zagajewski who Zagajewski was eulogising, Czapski this man he knew so well. He said,
“As a thinking person, Czapski belonged to that rare breed of artists who though they battle and believe and doubt, and care passionately, at life’s end, still do not know.”
He continues, “This wasn’t an ‘I don’t know’ arising from laziness, a depression, a negativity or agnosticism. This ‘I don’t know’ of Czapski’s was positive, inspired, intelligent.” I love this. I think it is a beautiful description for zazen- open, inspired, intelligent. Intelligence of zazen, inspiration of zazen, openness of zazen. Really to live into this not-knowing, this not having opinions, is to live in a kind of innocence, or to live with a kind of wonder, on going wonder. Dongshan has a lovely way of describing this state of innocence and wonder and openness, in his Five Ranks. He says,
The Old Woman over-sleeping at day break encounters the ancient mirror and clearly sees a face that is no other than her own.
This old woman who we might have to call an unknown woman, or a not-knowing woman. The reference here was actually about being muddle-headed so it is possible it is a sexist image that is employed, back in the day. It is important that we recognise that we are this old woman, unknown woman, this not-knowing woman, particularly as we move deeper and deeper into sesshin. Deeper and deeper into this not-knowing. We know less and less of our opinions, and our ideas about things. I love the way Dongshan calls it ‘over-sleeping at daybreak’. That is like smoothing over any idea of where the break is, where the line is between night and day. When we look, we never find such a line, this daybreak. If we really look, can we find a line between light and dark, between where a tree and the ground begins or ends. Where a leaf curling in the light in the sky, begins or ends. When we oversleep these boundaries, that is rousing or expressing this mind of I don’t know. One thing flows seamlessly into the other. That is, Dongshan says, when we encounter the ancient mirror.
I have a nice home-grown case that I can’t resist injecting into this part of the talk because it features my son. I said this to Susan and she has given it a lovely title which is ‘Hamish’s Unimaginable’. This is the case and this is how it happened:
One day I was driving up the mountains to go rock scrambling with my son Hamish who is 8 years old. Out of the blue he said, ‘You can’t actually imagine death.’ ‘It’s amazing isn’t it,’ I said. Hamish fell silent, then said, ‘Then we can’t imaging life either. We can see it but we can’t imagine it.’ Surely Caoshan would have given this 85%, or 90%, because it is beautiful. I’m sure we can hear just how wonderfully Hamish has over-slept this line between life and death.
I want to ask, how is encountering life different to imagining it, just as Hamish wants to there.
There is a beautiful story that I tripped across, randomly flipping through Dongen’s giant tome of a book, The Shobogenzo. I found he has an entire essay devoted to The Old Mirror. Almost in passing he mentions this story about our 18th ancestor of the tradition, Kayashata, a very interesting story with a very interesting twist.
When Kayashata was born he was born together with a mirror and wherever he went the mirror would go too. If he lay down, the mirror would lie down, if he sat up the mirror would sit up too. If he went to the garden, the mirror would be there as well. Dogen says, ‘All Buddhas from the past, present and future could be seen in Kayshata’s mirror. Every aspect of heavenly and human affairs was clearly reflected in the mirror. The mirror could reveal any teaching ancient or current, more clearly than the scriptures.’ Just as these frogs reveal the mirror more clearly than the scriptures. Here is the twist: ‘However’, says Dogen, ‘when the boy left home and received the precepts, the mirror disappeared.’ Why? Where did it go? Why would receiving the precepts, taking refuge in every day activity, cause the mirror to vanish?
To look at this marvellous point, I want to bring in another case from Entangling Vines. Case 14. ‘Changshen asked Lingyun, ‘What is it to closely resemble enlightenment?’ ‘It is like the infinite luminosity of a mirror’, said Lingyun. ‘Is there then a transcendence even of this?’ ‘There is’, said Lingyun. ‘What is it that transcendence?’ Changshen asked. Lingyun said, ‘Smash the mirror then you and I can meet.’ So when the mirror is smashed, we no longer see each other, or are reflected in each other. We are each other. This is true meeting, face to face.
We must do this. If we cannot recognise our true selves in each and every thing from degraded forests, degraded people, the broken sea. We thought we couldn’t break it but we just about have. We have just about broken the sea. In all the trampled values, debased hearts and minds, all of these vexing dimensions to life, if we can’t recognise ourselves as those things, how can we save them? How can we deal with this?
So important this practice, the open, intelligent, inspired dimension of this practice. We are not just reflected in these difficulties, we don’t just see them. We are them. Even just to remove ourselves ever so subtly from these things, to put ourselves behind even the thinnest veil of glass, even the slightest remove, is to betray the world, as cruel and uncompromising and incredible as this world is. So smash the mirror because only then can we return as Kayashata does, in taking refuge in every day life, only then can we come back to the crisp immediacy of everyday life.
That is where the Jewel Mirror of Samadhi takes us, the verse I put up to begin with, of Dongshan’s. He lands us right in this place. Here are the final two lines:
Working unobserved, functioning secretly, appearing dull, seemingly stupid
If one can simply persist in that, it is called the host’s view of the host.
This is working in the world without a veil. It is responding to circumstances just as we appear, stupid, seemingly dull, as donkeys that we are, just as we are. That includes all of the anxious, enfeebled, sometimes confused, bumbling states that we do find ourselves in. When we allow the world to move us, just as we are, instead of trying to move the world into some sort of shape that we prefer, like- I wish I wasn’t anxious right now or nervous right now. Too bad, we are, so allow the world to work its way through you. This is important because as soon as we push the world in a direction that is something we prefer, we subtly or grossly cause harm. When we don’t, when we allow the world to appear, just as it does, that is healing, that is healing the world. Dongshan calls this healing ‘the host’s view of the host’, which is another way of saying, the old mirror viewing the old mirror, which finally erases the old mirror. When we genuinely recognise ourselves in each unrepeatable thing, then the mirror disappears. Then we realise there was no mirror, just our original face.
I will leave you with a poem that does a beautiful job of expressing this ‘host’s view of the host’, in a lovely, light but deep and heart-felt way. It is by a Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki:
Break the Mirror
In the morning
After taking cold shower
—-what a mistake—-
I look at the mirror.
There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
—-what a pity—-
Poor, dirty, old man,
He is not me, absolutely not.
Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in the mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war—
I’ll never be tired of life.
Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.
Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.”
***********************
ZEN OPEN CIRCLE
SPRING SESSHIN 2018
CLOUD MOUNTAIN, NSW,
KYNAN SUTHERLAND