Forms

With palms together,


Good Morning Everyone,



Last night we nearly had a full house for evening Zazen. There were four of us facing the wall. In my small Zendo, this is a considerable number. After practice, Rev. Kajo served tea and I told the story of the Buddha’s enlightenment.



It is quite a story, you know: Leaving his family, seeking a cure for suffering, finding it, then wandering around the countryside through cities and villages, practicing and teaching the Way. Recently, on my Tricycle.com’s community page, a friend and I came to be on “the same page.” This page has to do with emptiness on the one hand, and teaching on the other. He comes at things as a Daoist: that which can be spoken is not the Dao. I find him delightfully challenging, especially since I came to Zen through a Daoist POV (one of my very early online IDs was Taoist).



In my opinion, the Buddha never taught anything but method. He declined comment on the philosophic arguments of the day. His sutras are about how to practice, thus how to live, because from his POV they were the same. He was the ultimate pragmatist. While it is true that he did establish rules and guidelines for the Sangha, understand these rules are about how to live, they are not forms to be mindlessly revered or taught as dogma.



The trouble is, as forms develop they often become replacements for the aim of the forms themselves(awakening). Dogen Zenji was somewhat guilty of this, becoming quite dogmatic in his assertions regarding Zazen as practice realization. In some ways, his teaching de-mystified the enlightenment experience. He took the magic out of it. Just sit down, take up the Buddha’s posture, and there you are.



I believe this is so, as I experience its truth each moment. Yet, it takes much practice to understand what Dogen was actually saying. An unpracticed understanding misses the mark and is rather like sliding stones along the surface of the pond.



Our forms should be contemporaneous, not mindless repetitions of the past. Forms have a context, indeed they are a context, for practice. It is the practice, friends, that is the point not the derivatives.



Be well.