We sit with an upright bodily posture on our cushions. We inhale and exhale and carefully follow each breath as it happens. We quiet or at least slow down the incessant activity of the mind. While sitting we note each breath with the intention of living fully in the present moment. One practice is to breathe in all the greed, anger and ignorance of the world, hold them and purify them before exhaling them back into the world as generosity, compassion and consciousness. This is the essence of our daily practice and it requires, builds and enhances awareness.
With such a practice, the intention of each sitting encompasses a world that is a bit more generous, compassionate and conscious. And all it takes is allowing the mind to be calm enough to pay attention to each inhaled and exhaled breath in the present moment. Awareness is not the same thing as control. It is possible to be completely aware of your universal nature or Buddha nature, but it is never possible to be completely in control. That is, we can practice being completely aware of each breath and we have a limited control of how we breathe—the world record for holding the breath is more than 19 minutes—but eventually control breaks down and the best we can do is let the breath in and be aware of universal nature. (Can you imagine the first exhale after 19 minutes? And the first inhale after that?)
This apparent but not real dichotomy is sometimes described in Buddhism with terms like “small mind/big mind” and ‘small self/universal nature.” Suzuki Roshi said, “If you think ‘I breathe,’ the ‘I’ is extra. There is no you to say ‘I.’ What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale and when we exhale. It just moves; that is all…Our usual understanding of life is dualistic: you and I, this and that, good and bad. But actually these discriminations are themselves the awareness of the universal existence. ‘You’ means to be aware of the universe in the form of you, and ‘I’ means to be aware of it in the form of I. You and I are just swinging doors. This kind of understanding is necessary. This should not even be called understanding; it is actually the true experience of life through Zen practice.”
Because we live in snow country I like this depiction of “…the true experience of life” by Dennis Genpo Merzel: “When we allow everything to just be, it all functions perfectly, exactly the way we want because we give up wanting it to be any other way. The trick is to let go of wanting. When we give up our preconceptions of where the snow should fall and let it fall where it falls, then there is no question about what to do. Grab a shovel. Instead of fighting and resisting, we can simply take care of each situation as it happens.”
Life happens and often life is untidy and difficult. Snow falls and often it is inconvenient and even dangerous. The mind goes where it will and often it goes a long, long way from right here, right now. What Buddhists call small mind can judge untidiness, inconvenience and unawareness in terms of bad, should not and avoidance. Big mind simply observes and grabs a shovel.
When we let go of the dualistic—you and I, mine and yours, good and bad, right and wrong—we also let go of confusion, indecision, dissatisfaction and depression. Not until we quit fighting and resisting the universe as it is are we able to realize, or, for that matter, even get a glimpse of, our own universal or Buddha nature. And that nature is not, of course, limited to Buddhists, or Buddhist thought or Buddhist practice. Buddhism is only the type of shovel some of us happen to use.
When I was a young man, long before Buddhism entered my life (at least consciously), I sometimes experienced moments of what seemed to me extraordinary clarity and composure. They seemed extraordinary because they were rare and because they were so different from my ordinary life, and they happened in times of action and in times of contemplation. I had no idea what those experiences were or what caused them, but they made me happy and I came to think of them as “being at one with myself.” Now I realize that everyone has moments like that and that they are glimpses of Buddha or universal nature. It is a true experience of life. It is the awareness of what Suzuki Roshi terms “the universal existence.” That is, you are the universe.
That is a statement with implications.
Thank you.