Sanshin's six practice guidelines |
Uchiyama Roshi's seven points of practice
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Sanshin Zen Community enables the investigation of interconnectedness as it manifests in community by engaging in six practice guidelines within the Soto Zen tradition. We inherit the first three of our six points from Kosho Uchiyama's approach to zazen, which is characterized by three elements. The next two points arise from founder Shohaku Okumura's practice vision for the way we carry out zazen, work, study and ritual. Finally, we recognize the importance of Sawaki Roshi's leadership in the 20th century nyoho-e movement.
The study of the meaning of zazen in the context of Buddha's teachings, understanding the common thread that runs from the teachings of Shakyamuni through the Mahayana tradition, the teachings of Dogen Zenji, Sawaki and Uchiyama Roshis, down to Okumura Roshi and the practice of shikantaza at Sanshin today. Keeping forms and ceremonies simple in order to understand what we're doing and why, and to maintain their connection with zazen. Rather than being merely performances, forms should come from the mind of shikantaza as an expression of respect and gratitude. Understanding the significance of zazen and study in modern daily life so that we can maintain a balance between progress and peace of mind. We live with a tension between chasing after or escaping from things and avoiding taking any action at all in order to remain calm. Shikantaza teaches us how to take the necessary wise and compassionate action without fanning the flames of our delusion. Because of our intensive focus on sitting, we engage in dharma study as a support for zazen. "When I began genzo-e, I thought it was dangerous to sit as much as we do at Sanshinji without understanding the deep meaning of zazen practice taught by Dogen Zenji. For me, zazen is the main thing; studying Dogen Zenji's teachings supports intensive zazen practice. Intellectual understanding only without sitting is not so meaningful." Work practice is an investigation of community rather than simply being volunteer work at the temple or in the world. This is where we actively practice with the precepts, come to understand beneficial action, and directly experience the sangha as the virtue of peace and harmony. Under the umbrella of work practice, we're focusing our exploration in two areas: bodhisattva leadership and nyoho, things made or done according to the dharma. We deeply inquire into the teaching of ehou ichinyo, kesa and dharma are one. With the Sawaki Nyoho Treasury, we aspire to be responsible for collecting and offering the most complete and accurate set of resources possible related specifically to our dharma great-grandfather’s nyoho-e teachings and practices. |
In his final lecture at Antaiji before his retirement, Uchiyama Roshi offered seven points of practice as his parting instructions. These seven points are also a useful summary of Sanshin style. On the surface they seem straightforward enough, but when seen through the lens of Sanshin style they point us right back to the subtleties of non-reliance and interconnectedness and show what those teachings look like in the real world. Here, we offer some connections between these seven points and Sanshin style.
In his lecture, Uchiyama Roshi said that in order to understand this first point, we have to understand what buddha-dharma is—nothing more than opening the hand of thought, or no longer relying on what we make up in our heads, so that we can become aware of the reality of this moment. When we do, we can see that there is nothing other than our own awakening to the reality of this moment on which we can rely. On that basis, with nothing outside of this moment to gain or reach, practice and awakening become one. What’s driving our practice? What are we relying on to keep bringing us back to the cushion? If it’s anything other than our own awakening, we’ve missed the mark. “You have to understand that practicing the buddhadharma is nothing like drinking a bottle of soda pop and feeling refreshed. People want the buddhadharma to be useful or to satisfy their desires. That’s no good. The true Buddha Way is to practice buddhadharma for its own sake,” Uchiyama Roshi explained. [Opening the Hand, p. 150]
Is Uchiyama Roshi telling us to abandon our teachers and sanghas? Well, no. Ironically, we need our human teachers to show us that zazen is the real teacher! We need to perfectly follow our imperfect teachers in order to learn how to do our own practice in the midst of practicing with others, without relying solely on our own opinions and ideas. We can’t do this on our own. “When you practice all for yourself without a teacher, you will end up just doing whatever comes into your mind,” warns Uchiyama Roshi. “But that has nothing to do with practicing Buddhism.” It’s true that much of our practice can’t really be understood from simply reading a book or watching a video. We learn to sit from a human teacher, we may discuss the dharma with a human teacher, and we become established in our practice by watching and emulating a human teacher. Nonetheless, as important as all that is, it’s zazen—the activity of opening the hand of thought and not relying on our own opinions—that really shows us the way. This doesn’t mean that other elements of our practice aren’t meaningful or important. Studying Buddhist history or drawing encouragement from a sangha are good. Our problems begin when we start relying only on these things to create a worldview, build a sense of self or construct a system of values. We need to consider who and what we venerate as “teachers” and how we determine what “truth” is. We don’t often stop to ask ourselves these things, but they’re important in uncovering our assumptions and habituated thinking. Arthur Braverman recalled, “Uchiyama Roshi had an independent spirit and he wanted his students to develop that same independent spirit. He clearly saw the danger of students looking for an authority to tell them how to be; of how they flounder when their teacher is no longer there for them. I’m sure this was brought home to him in his relationship with his teacher. It was his teaching an independent practice, one which needed neither teacher nor support group but could accommodate both, that I learned to appreciate most. You could find no excuse not to sit other than that you didn’t want to.” We can see this approach carried on today in the way teachers and practitioners practice together at Sanshin. Okumura Roshi’s explanation of our non-reliance on a system of training echoes the words of his own teacher. “I do not have any intention to teach my disciples,” Uchiyama Roshi wrote, “because people who come to a poor temple like Antaiji to practice and become monks must have within themselves their own aspiration to practice. I don’t need to worry about teaching them. “No matter how unreliable I am, there is the wonderful practice of zazen as a community of practitioners at Antaiji. The zazen that each one of us practices is the true teacher. The only thing I should teach my disciples is that zazen is their true teacher. Then each one of them develops without my guidance. “I make them thoroughly aware of the fact that to grow or fall only depends upon the self, and then I allow them to practice with their own aspiration. They cannot refrain from practice of their own accord.” [The Wholehearted Way p. 120-121]
When explaining this point, Uchiyama Roshi said that a practice of non-reliance frees us from the lure of rokudo zen, or the zen of the six realms. In each of these realms our zazen is attached to something and being driven by something other than bodhicitta itself. In the hell realm, we sit zazen because we think we have to, maybe in order to complete a sesshin or a training process. In the realm of hungry ghosts, our desire to get “enlightenment” or something else out of our practice is insatiable. In the animal realm we practice in exchange for the basic necessities of life, taking shelter in the temple or sangha because it’s easier than making our own way and relying on ourselves. In the realm of fighting gods we argue over which practice is better and which practitioner is most awakened in order to build our sense of self. In the human realm, we get caught up in practice for the sake of utility and zazen becomes a tool for self-improvement. In the heavenly realm, we’re looking to our practice to shield us from the painful, mundane world. “Lots of people who practice this way want to be hermits or saints,” explained Uchiyama Roshi. “Lots of Americans seem drawn to this type of zen. I guess they want to escape from the noisy, materialistic society of America and live in remote mountains enjoying the silence. This is zen undertaken as a hobby or a fad. It has absolutely nothing to do with the buddhadharma.” [Opening the Hand, p.153] Taking a step back and considering practice from the broader, absolute perspective—through the lens of non-reliance—lets us see how our practice can be trapped in the rokudo. It’s the opposite of gaining is delusion, losing is enlightenment. Interestingly, Uchiyama went on to say that this understanding of gaining and losing means that we are actively participating in loss. Not only are we simply not indulging our desires, we’re taking responsibility for letting go of the fabrications on which we rely for finding meaning in our practice. “For breaking the ego’s grip,” he notes, “nothing is more effective than giving something up.” [Opening the Hand, p.154] The difficulty we have in giving up our reliance on the small self alone is what makes vow and repentance so important. When we make bodhisattva vows, we’re not really promising to do something in the future. The vow itself is the activity of the universal self, and in the moment it’s made it’s also carried out. However, because we’re bound by our karmic conditions, it’s hard for us to fully understand and embody the interconnectedness of the personal self and the universal self. Repentance is simply the acknowledgement that we haven’t yet completely seen all the way to the bottom of non-reliance. Our practice is to hold both this acknowledgement that our practice of non-reliance is incomplete and the vow that is the actual complete working of the universe in this moment, from which we are not separate. The three minds are the way we stand up in the middle of that intersection. They are the way that the small self manifests the universal self. The magnanimous mind frees us from our reliance on distinctions and discriminations and allows us to see and accept the entirety of this moment. The nurturing mind frees us from reliance on self-defense and allows us to think of and care for others. The joyful mind frees us from our reliance on satisfying all of the demands of the small self and allows us to appreciate and enjoy whatever we encounter.
When we first begin to practice, it might be because we’re looking for an easy or painless way to solve our problems or fix ourselves or somehow turn our lives into something better than what we have now. The Buddha quotes we’ve seen online look interesting, and it seems like sitting peacefully in zazen is something we can do without much effort, so we’re willing to take it on in hopes that we’ll soon start to feel better about ourselves and our circumstances. Pretty soon, though, we discover that this practice is not so easy after all. We’re not used to sitting quietly without an agenda. The greeting-card quotes on our phones turn out to have a fair degree of subtlety that deeply challenges the way we think and live. Maybe this whole thing isn’t what we thought it was. Maybe our friends were right when they said it was a bit crazy. Maybe it’s too hard, and time to move on to the next activity. But our bodhicitta won’t let us give up that easily. Why are we relying on our conjectures about the nature of practice? Why are we relying on what others think of us in determining how we want to live? Why are we relying on our preconcieved ideas about what we can really do and, in the words of Dogen, whether or not we’re really vessels of the dharma? In the course of our practice lives, we’re going to encounter obstacle after obstacle. The ego wants stuff, and we’ve spent all our lives satisfying those desires without thinking twice; now we’re learning that that’s a problem. Sesshin is hard, both physically and mentally. Getting along with others in the sangha community can be a challenge. Practice takes time in our already overloaded schedules. Dogen says obscure things like “The green mountains are always walking”—what the heck does that mean? Within the Sanshin style of practice, we take responsibility for overcoming those obstacles ourselves without assuming that something else, like a teacher or ceremony or curriculum, is going to carry us over them. That doesn’t mean our teachers and sanghas and communal activities aren’t supportive and meaningful, and that we don’t draw encouragement and help from them. We simply recognize that it’s up to us to ask the questions, listen to the answers, study the teachings, get on the cushion, and embody awakening in our daily work and life. That means the flame of our bodhicitta has to be carried in such a way that it can’t be blown out by the first breeze that comes along. We need some stick-to-itiveness in this practice, but that doesn’t come from sheer grit and determination or some idea about being an elite practitioner. We don’t practice as a test of endurance. The only thing on which we can rely is our own awakening, which we root deeply as our vow to live as bodhisattvas no matter what. If we live by any other means—by chasing after things or running away from things in order to shore up our sense of self—we’re living on the surface of our lives, and the bodhicitta flame is going to take a beating. By recognizing and deeply entering into the reality of interconnectedness, we can carry out the vow that comes from our own awakening.
Sometimes it takes awhile for us to realize that practicing in a community is not like a program or entertainment where you pay for your ticket and then sit back to enjoy watching a performance put on for your benefit. The community itself is the activity, and when you agree to participate, you become an integral part of its life. There are no guests and hosts. There are no teachers and students. There is only one living entity carrying out one practice. That means we don’t just sit around and wait to be told things. We observe, imitate, follow and fully engage. Leaders make an effort to orient us, but we need to meet them halfway by paying attention to what’s happening around us and not assuming that the larger picture doesn’t matter. Non-reliance means we don’t depend on our own small view for all of our information. We return to the perspective of interconnectedness and participate in the entire reality of this moment. A commitment to practice is a commitment to pay attention. Especially during sesshin, much of the communication is non-verbal, coming through bells, forms or gestures. If you realize you’re out of step, your ego might take comfort in saying to itself, “I didn’t know because nobody told me.” But are you sure there was no chance for you to have observed what was happening and corrected your actions by yourself? Hoko says, "I frequently notice practitioners who, after participating week after week for some time, still don’t put their hands in gassho when I come behind them in the zendo in the morning, or still don’t bow to their cushions before turning and bowing to the person across from them—and still haven’t noticed that everyone else is doing something different. I don’t know whether to be amused or dismayed. I hope that one day they will wake up. The waking up is itself the practice, and if I keep correcting them, they don’t have the chance to do it themselves." It’s convenient to blame our karmic circumstances for our practice situation: well, I’m a beginner, or I’ve been away for awhile, or I was never much good at forms. All of those things might be true, but using them as excuses is simply an exercise in preserving the ego. Non-reliance means there’s no one and nothing to blame out there somewhere for what we do. They’re not responsible for us. Although it’s important for us to take responsibility for our own practice, we have to be careful about falling into trying to develop into something or trying to make progress toward a goal or reward. We might think of backsliding as a lapse of mindfulness. We’ve forgotten to practice what Buddha taught. The good news is that in this moment we can get right back onto the path. This is vow and repentance in action.
Although Uchiyama Roshi was making a point here that practice is our life activity and so we just keep on doing it, the element of silence is important too. Since there’s no reward for our practice, there’s no timer ticking away to indicate when we’ve cooked long enough. There’s no hurry about our practice, because the practice of this moment is complete practice. There’s no other place we’re trying to reach. We’re already there. At the same time, there is effort and some sense of urgency precisely because there is no other moment in which we can practice. If we’re not practicing now, for what are we waiting? What’s keeping us from it? At what point will conditions be right? On what are we relying to get us back on the cushion? While the zazen of the beginner and the experienced practitioner are not different, undoing our deeply habituated thinking doesn’t happen overnight. Uchiyama Roshi explained, "One minute of zazen is one minute of Buddha. Your first zazen is your first sitting Buddha. That is good zazen. You don’t need to accumulate experiences to do true zazen. However, the reason I tell [practitioners] to sit silently for ten years is that we are usually apt to think that gaining money, power, or fame is good; we have to go through long practice before we can truly convince ourselves that such things are not valuable at all. If you practice zazen for ten or twenty years without concern for money, power, or fame, you will see that there is something more valuable than those things." [The Wholehearted Way, p. 97] This is when we stop relying on things of the world for our sense of self because zazen has shown us that they are unreliable as a means of measuring our worth. Settling down in one place and practicing consistently with a teacher and sangha, we can stop holding up the yardstick both to our own practice and to the community. If we’re bouncing from one tradition or teacher or practice or sangha to another, it might be because we’re looking for the quick fix, the silver bullet that will end all our suffering right now. Can we truly and fully understand a practice or a teaching by simply scratching the surface and then moving on when things are challenging? Uchiyama Roshi taught, "You should not forget though that to practice the Buddha way means to let go of the self and practice egolessness. To let go of the self and practice egolessness again means to let go of the measuring stick that we are always carrying around with us in our brains. For this, you must loyally follow the teaching of the teacher and the rules of the place of practice that you have chosen, without stating your own preferences or judgements of good and bad. It is important to first sit silently in one place for at least ten years. "If, on the other hand, you start to judge the good and bad sides of your teacher or the place of practice before the first ten years have passed, and you start to think that maybe there is a better teacher or place somewhere else and go look for it, then you are just following the measuring stick of your own ego, which has absolutely nothing to do with practicing the Buddha way." We must have patience with ourselves, our teachers and our community. Engaging in the deep investigation of interconnectedness as it manifests in that community is a real dharma gate for the practice of patience. Living with other practitioners isn’t always easy, even though we’re all walking the path together. Learning not to rely on our personal measuring sticks is a big part of that investigation. He goes on, "It is absolutely necessary to first find a good teacher and to follow him or her. Fortunately, there are still teachers that transmit the Buddha-Dharma correctly in the form of zazen. Follow such a teacher without complaining and sit silently for at least ten years. Then, after ten years, sit for another ten years. And then, after twenty years, sit anew for another ten years. If you sit like this throughout thirty years, you will gain a good view over the landscape of zazen—and that means also a good view of the landscape of your own life. Of course that does not mean that thus your practice comes to an end - practice always has to be the practice of your whole life." It’s important that Uchiyama Roshi keeps telling us not just to sit for decades and decades, but to sit silently for decades and decades. Of course, during our zazen we don’t talk and make noise externally, but we can certainly talk and make noise internally. We can tell ourselves all kinds of stories while we’re sitting and facing the wall. If we can maintain some internal silence even when we’ve gotten up from the cushion and left the zendo, then the whole day becomes a period of zazen whether or not we’re in the middle of sesshin.
A community of practitioners is a collection of many points of bodhicitta. Each of those bits of aspiration supports the others because the individual nodes in the network are already linked. Sawaki Roshi likened the practice community to the fire in a grill. If you put in one small coal, it will go out pretty quickly. If you put in many small coals, you can have a real fire. It’s important that everyone understand what the temple and sangha really are and really do. We all need to deeply investigate and embody the Sanshin style of practice so that we can understand what Okumura Roshi has been trying to do here in carrying on the practice he inherited from his teacher and his teacher’s teacher. That practice has now been handed on to us to carry forward. We must have a shared vision so we can cooperate with each other in keeping that style alive and available in the US and around the world. We can think of the Sanshin style as a particular dialect of Soto Zen practice, not better or worse than others, but offering a specific element to the national and international dharma conversation. While Sanshin Zen Community carries the legacy of our dharma family and provides a place to which practitioners can come home to experience this style, these days it’s not the only location at which this practice is available. Okumura Roshi’s dharma descendants across space and time continue to uphold and transmit this style, cooperating across the Sanshin Network to create places of practice that honor the teachings of our early and immediate ancestors. |
