With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,
Zen is about disciplined practice and yet, paradoxically, it is this discipline that leads to freedom. What is this freedom? According to Matsuoka-roshi, my dharma grandfather, it is freedom from mind and body and all attachments derived wherefrom. He, like Seung Sahn, used the points on a compass to explicate this. These cardinal points are really markers pointing to the depth of our practice on the one hand or the degree of freedom we have “attained” on the other hand.
At zero degrees we are what some of us might refer to as asleep: living in small mind, attached to name and form. At 90 degrees we see differences in things by varying degrees: we are attached to exteriors. At 180 degrees we have transcended attachment to thinking, attained “emptiness,” but have attached to it. At 270 degrees we attain “imaginative thinking.” We have what both Masters referred to as “Freedom I.” that sense of “I” that is free from the constraints of logic, reason, and so forth. Here the moon can sing, ants might soar, and mountains walk. The danger, as in every step around the circle is in getting caught in it. “This ‘freedom I’ must be transcended also” says Matsuoka. So, at 360 degrees we reach complete non-attachment to thinking. Here we are free from everything: all desire, all name and form, all discrimination. It is here that we are born.
Being born is being free. It is an opportunity to be the buddha you are. From this freedom arises the paramitas, those aspects of our true self hidden by the constraints of thought, name, and form, as well as the need to hold and protect them.
What would it be like to be completely free? This is your practice.
Be well.
Good Morning Everyone,
Zen is about disciplined practice and yet, paradoxically, it is this discipline that leads to freedom. What is this freedom? According to Matsuoka-roshi, my dharma grandfather, it is freedom from mind and body and all attachments derived wherefrom. He, like Seung Sahn, used the points on a compass to explicate this. These cardinal points are really markers pointing to the depth of our practice on the one hand or the degree of freedom we have “attained” on the other hand.
At zero degrees we are what some of us might refer to as asleep: living in small mind, attached to name and form. At 90 degrees we see differences in things by varying degrees: we are attached to exteriors. At 180 degrees we have transcended attachment to thinking, attained “emptiness,” but have attached to it. At 270 degrees we attain “imaginative thinking.” We have what both Masters referred to as “Freedom I.” that sense of “I” that is free from the constraints of logic, reason, and so forth. Here the moon can sing, ants might soar, and mountains walk. The danger, as in every step around the circle is in getting caught in it. “This ‘freedom I’ must be transcended also” says Matsuoka. So, at 360 degrees we reach complete non-attachment to thinking. Here we are free from everything: all desire, all name and form, all discrimination. It is here that we are born.
Being born is being free. It is an opportunity to be the buddha you are. From this freedom arises the paramitas, those aspects of our true self hidden by the constraints of thought, name, and form, as well as the need to hold and protect them.
What would it be like to be completely free? This is your practice.
Be well.
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