Tonight in class, Paul (the abbot) cautioned us against confusing doing with being. He had mentioned this in an earlier dharma talk- pointing out the fact that as soon as you ask someone to meditate, they immediately want to "do" something: to sit, to put their hands in a certain position, etc. But in reality, what we need to do is just "be." He talked about this again tonight when he referred to a koan about a young monk and an old monk.
The young monk is meditating and when the old monk asks him what he is doing he says something to the effect of: "I'm sitting so that I can become a Buddha." The old monk then picks up a brick and starts scraping it on the ground. When the young monk asks him what he's doing he says something to the effect of: "I'm polishing a brick to make it in to a jewel."
When I first heard this koan, I thought that the old monk did this to point out the impossibility of polishing a brick in order to make it into a jewel; with the parallel lesson of the impossibility of becoming a Buddha by just sitting there. But then I thought, "That's really confusing. Isn't that what they're telling us to do? Meditate so that we develop the practice of responding to things instead of reacting to them? Of being present to what comes up? Of seeing the world just as it is? If sitting doesn't lead us to being a Buddha, then what does?" But after tonight, I think this koan is telling us other things.
First, I think it comes back to what I had blogged about earlier: the concept of having intentions instead of goals. You don't sit with a goal in mind that it will help you to become a buddha, because if you do, you will experience disappointment in the fact that you haven't reached your goal. You sit with the intention of developing a presence of mind that allows you to be more present, etc. But when you aren't more present, you don't evaluate your sitting or feel like you've failed, you just respond to it the same way you respond to the rest of your experience: see it just as it is.
But the other part of this is this thing about kind of embodying this practice rather than grasping at it. This is harder for me to articulate but I do think it's about being present instead of acting present. Paul used the example of walking into the zendo: that people walk into the zendo quietly, with certain forms, with this thought of "am I entering the zendo correctly?" or "look at me and how well I am entering the zendo." When in reality, you just enter the zendo. You do it in a way that doesn't disturb others and that allows you to come in and meditate.
When I think about the times that I am most present, it is often when I'm not actually trying to be present. It's those days when I don't know why things worked out, they just did. Now maybe they worked out because I wasn't thinking about them, because I didn't have expectations about them so I wasn't disappointed. But I kind of think these days show up when I've been pretty regular in my practice, meditating without really thinking about it, and being aware of maintaining my practice but in a way that I just am it instead of trying to attain it.
And I guess this all fits in with the first part of the class that Paul is teaching: Sila- supporting your practice. It seems like it only comes over time, with continued effort and a willingness to let go.
No comments:
Post a Comment