Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom by Kosho Uchiyama

Author:Kosho Uchiyama
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

This zazen we do is just a wonder, a mystery, a marvel. We have to aim, but there is no “hitting the mark”! If we are going to talk about facing a wall and hitting the mark, then we are better off going to a pachinko parlor. If one of those balls goes in the right hole—bingo! Doing zazen, however, we aim with all our strength to sit properly, but there is never any hitting the mark; there is no mark at all.

A passage from the “Genjō Kōan” fascicle of Shōbōgenzō reads, “Even though Dharma fills body and mind sufficiently, there is a feeling of something missing . . .”129; since there is no mark or target, there is a sense of something being not quite satisfactory. What is crucial here is doing and acting with all our strength even with that feeling of insufficiency or incompleteness. We get all confused because we are always trying to fully satisfy ourselves. If there were some way to know that while sitting zazen we had become fully realized, this would amount to a calculating and measureable satisfaction. But then, that’s not zazen; that’s just thinking going on in our heads, a kind of self-observation. True zazen is just sitting with that feeling of insufficiency.130 We don’t do zazen in order to calculate our realization; we just act, just manifest the present.

The vivid eye—our intrinsic or natural universal identity, that which is from the beginning, all/all—cannot be measured. Even if it were measurable, it couldn’t be done with the conditioned eye that sees only as one/all. There is no other way than for your own eye to open naturally. There is no other person131 who can understand this. The “just aiming” of our universal identity of all/all is entirely different from the discriminating, calculating self of one/all.

In Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki as well, there is a passage that goes “As long as we attempt to evaluate and calculate what Buddhadharma is with our thinking mind, there is no way to do it in ten thousand lifetimes . . . we attain the Way only with the body.” It’s no good trying to figure out what Buddhadharma is with our thinking mind. All there is is the doing. Sitting at one’s desk and contemplating the merging into one realm of subject and object the way so many Zen buffs like to do is utter nonsense. A similar passage in Instructions to the Cook reads, “The Way-Seeking Mind of a tenzo is actualized by rolling up your sleeves.”132 In other words, precisely in the midst of getting down to work can we find the so-called oneness of subject and object.

Just as in the case of refraining in our text, carrying out is also found within the internal structure of all-inclusive self. We might say that just as that fundamental life force in me is “all-inclusive self” facing “all-encompassing depth,” these actions get carried out. This is the true life force. Take any weed along the roadside; it grows of its own accord.

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