Body of Buddha |
We have been exploring the teachings of the Trikaya, the three bodies of Buddha, and how this teaching applies to our own human body. As I mentioned yesterday, the Buddha body with its three aspects is defined in the glossary of Moon in a Dewdrop as also being “known as the true human body.” Even though this may sound a bit farfetched, one practical effect of thinking this way is to recognize that we are never outside of our own experience, and there is therefore nowhere to go and nowhere to search for truth or liberation outside of our own life, which we experience with this body. The experiences of this body/mind are our entire universe. And the universe looks different from the perspective of each body/mind. While pondering all this I decided I should go back and consider what the Buddha said about who he is since he never claimed to be anything but human. We are taught that after he experienced enlightenment, Siddhartha Gautama regularly referred to himself as the Tathāgata (nyorai in Japanese) a term that he used to denote all Buddhas. The meaning of the word tathāgata is another place where one can go down a deep, winding rabbit hole. It is accepted among scholars that the word’s original meaning is not clear. Fifth century Indian Theravada Buddhist commentator, translator, and philosopher, Buddhaghosa, gives eight interpretations of the word tathāgata, all with etymological support, in his commentary on the Dīgha Nikāya in the Pali Cannon. In Sanskrit, tathāgata can be broken down to mean both “one who is thus gone” (tathā + gata) and “one who has thus come.” (tathā + āgata) it can also mean, “one who has thus not gone” (tathā + agata) All this together implies to me that he experienced what is beyond all coming and going within what is normally viewed as coming and going. Sometimes tathāgata is translated as one who has come from thusness, or suchness, “things as it is”, as Suzuki Roshi would say. According to the Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, the Sanskrit root “gam” is also used with prepositions in words that mean understand so tathāgata can also be interpreted as meaning “to understand things as they are.” It feels important to me to ponder what the human being Siddhartha Gautama meant when he called himself Tathāgata, because it has implications for how he perceived his existence in the world while being human. I will be looking at this for the rest of my life. For now, tathāgata implies to me recognizing coming into and out of existence due to causes and conditions, while also staying rooted in something more fundamental than what merely appears to be coming and going. Coming from thusness or suchness, or understanding thusness or suchness, implies awareness of the fundamental way that things exist beyond appearances, a seamless reality. In Nishijima & Cross’ translation of the Dogen fascicle, Nyorai-Zenshin (The Whole Body of the Tathāgata), they say, Nyorai represents the Chinese translation of the Sanskrit word tathāgata, which means a person who has arrived at the truth. Sometimes, as in this case, nyorai means Gautama Buddha himself. Zenshin means “the whole body.” In this chapter, Master Dogen teaches that Buddhist sutras are Gautama Buddha’s whole body, using the word “sutras” to express the real form of the Universe. Thus Master Dogen insists that the Universe is Gautama Buddha’s whole body. We can recall that Shakyamuni himself said right before he died that his body would be gone but the dharmakaya, the body of his teaching, would continue. If the entire universe is the Buddha’s body, the entire universe is our teacher and is expressing the teachings. We recognize that we learn in many ways and therefore the teachings or sutras can be expressed in many ways and by a variety of circumstances and beings. In fact, it can be expressed by all circumstances and all beings if everything is the Buddha’s body. Whether something is a teaching for us depends on how we experience it. Our own body is always how teachings come to us. There is no other way for us to experience. All experiences that we have are a co-dependent arising of what is occurring, and how we take in what is occurring. Ultimately each instance has the power to invite either suffering or nirvana depending on how we respond. A pebble striking bamboo; a babbling brook; the moon reflected in a drop of water; plum blossoms falling from a tree; a sudden bird song breaking the silence; a lawnmower humming as the sun stretches across the zendo floor; a plastic bag inflated and lifted by a breeze and swept up into the city sky—every instance speaks of impermanence, and emptiness, or co-dependent arising. And the truth of each instance is beyond any words or concepts we use to describe it. Our ability to “hear” these teachings deepens with practice. What we practice is letting go of the burden of the small self to experience ourselves as the true human body. We are able to experience the body of Buddha as the teaching when we get our karmic self out of the way. Each person has their own experience of how they are part of the one seamless reality. Katagiri Roshi says, Your human body is a bag of skin, and simultaneously it is something beyond a bag of skin-it is spiritual. So accept your human body as Buddha. What is meant by Buddha? There is something beyond the idea of purity or impurity, something working together with all sentient beings. This is the total picture of your human body. You cannot pin down exactly what it is, but temporarily we say Buddha. Everyone is this Buddha.… When you do this, the Buddha body blooms, and you go over the barrier of what you think of as your body…. That is sambhogakaya, truth manifested within your human body. Next moment, a thought arises and you are back in your ordinary body. Then, if you keep quiet, the Buddha body arises again. The important point is you can do something with your human body because it is more than just your body. You can do it because pure energy is always with you. It’s too close for you to know what it is intellectually, but you can be it. This is our practice. Katagiri says, “zazen as shikantaza is nothing but the experience of touching the flowing source of the human world before you are conscious of your own existence.” We sit and let go of the boundaries and definitions we create that limit us and make us small. Instead we experience ourselves within the entire network of interdependent origination as Okumura Roshi describes it. If I use this image of Indra’s net, a net of interdependent origination, to articulate what I am doing when sitting zazen, I am experiencing the intersection of threads that I am, while also experiencing the threads themselves and how each intersection including “me” is formed by those threads, instead of experiencing the intersections as separate entities. In this way I am making an effort to experience “my self,” one of the intersections, that is actually just the coming together of threads, as just part of the total fabric of reality -the true body of Buddha. Often when talking about zazen teachers talk about finding the breath, and staying with the breath. Sometimes the breath is difficult to find or stay with for some people. I find that for me personally an inhaled breath sometimes leads directly to mind and emotion until I am really settled. So, often I instead take the experience of awareness down into the mudra, or go down further to notice the sensations in my toes, feet, legs, bottom on the cushions, etc. because this feels like a rooted place to bring awareness of being. When doing that, when taking note of a particular place or sensation, I see this as pulling a bit at one of the intersections of threads in the fabric of reality for a moment to experience the tension it creates among the entire fabric/net. Have you ever played the environmental game in which you stand in a circle with each person representing an element of the environment? Lance is the sun, Sensei is the flower, Jakuko is the deer, etc. And as you explain the connections, you hand each person a section of a long rope until the rope criss crosses the circle of participants in a complex way. The sun feeds the flower. The deer and the flower drink the rain. The deer eats the flower. As you describe the relationships, you have each person tug on the rope to represent a change. The sun goes behind a cloud. Lance you are the sun, tug on the rope! When one person tugs, everyone feels it. When you feel a tug you tug as a response. The whole net begins moving! The point of noticing my toes or mudra, or the sensation of my legs is not to focus on that area alone, or to stay with that sensation at the exclusion of other sensations. Same with noticing the breath. It is only to feel the tug and bring me back into the reality of the present moment beyond the thought fabrications in my mind-so I can go back to experiencing the whole net-the fabric of reality. Another analogy would be to work on looking at the movie screen itself instead of the movie playing on the screen. Our thoughts are how we create separation between ourselves as one of the intersections and all the other intersections in the experience of zazen. If I am thinking, bringing attention to and making contact with a sensation is a way to re-enter the experience of the whole net. It has a discursive component that brings me back to a generalized awareness. When sitting in a more generalized awareness my breathing is happening, there is awareness of the breath constantly moving, as well as general awareness of sounds, something visual, sensation etc. But it is all like a seamless fabric. If I am not completely settled, and a bird calls out, there is awareness of my mind turning and being drawn towards the sound as if something is poking at the fabric and making part of it stick out. If there is separation then it is as if the bird is its own entity, a separate being no longer part of the seamless fabric and the seamless fabric becomes a collection of separate entities. It falls apart in my awareness. Sometimes, however, I can be settled enough that things occur and there is awareness but the mind doesn’t turn or move towards them. It stays still. It doesn’t move. The bird song does not get separated out, it just remains part of the seamless fabric or reality. I, maybe incorrectly, interpret this as what Dogen is talking about in Genjokoan when he says “To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.” When the mind is noticing a specific aspect of experience such as the bird song, I see this as carrying myself forward. It is a very subtle form of grasping. Once awareness of the whole seamless reality is happening, once really settled, then the myriad things that are occurring just occur and awareness exists without the mind moving towards or pulling at the appearance of them-without pulling at intersections of thread in the fabric. There is only seamlessness. In retrospect this experience is what I am referring to when I speak of being “held by the entire universe” and what I wish for for others. It is an experience of (human) being the seamless reality of experience, not a separate being experiencing it. The tension of the whole fabric is holding me as a crossroads within that net but the net is all one fabric. I do not have to expend energy holding up the reality of a separate self, a separate entity moving through reality alone and unsupported-it is a lie. “Putting down the burden of self” I can quietly take my place within the network of interdependent co-arising, my cross roads in the fabric of reality, and respond appropriately to the best of my ability. This is a story I am telling you to describe a wordless experience. Now we can let the story go. Suzuki Roshi said, Each one of us must have each one’s own way. And according to the situation, you should change your way to find some appropriate way. So, you cannot stick to anything. The only thing we have to do is to find some appropriate way under new situations. He also once said to practitioners at Tassajara, The basic problem is the same for everyone. Anyway, as long as you are here, don’t be too much concerned about yourself, or what you do, or what others do. Just observe Tassajara as one person who has every part of a body—hands, legs, head, ears, eyes. And let it work without much mistake. If you try to practice everyday practice our way with this idea, then there is salvation for each one of us. Earlier in my practice I thought there was some objective truth that I was going to be able to experience that was outside of me, separate from my senses. When I realized that experience was always only going to be from this limited perspective I felt a sense of disappointment. One time after a sesshin I expressed this to Sensei, the recognition that I could only experience as far as these eyes can see and these ears can hear, and that beyond that it becomes conceptual. She looked at me and said with a kindness that recognized the disappointment in my voice, “You can see the moon.” This startled and delighted me. Think about it: all the distance the light of the sun travels to strike the moon and bounce off it to then travel all the way to our eyes here on this planet! The experience of it exists within this body. We can not conceptualize the truth of our existence or the extent to which we are interconnected with all of reality. We can’t conceptualize its vastness. We can not conceptualize its limits! If Buddha means truth, then the truth of what is is expressed everywhere. An image of a buddha is representational. Words are also representational. Human creations such as images of Buddhas in multiple universes, or drawings of molecules, are both maps of our understanding of reality. They are types of stories. All these types of stories play important roles in guiding our understanding of the indescribable reality we are so fortunate to experience. In the Mountains and Waters Sutra, that sutra that drew me in so completely, Dogen says delightful things like, “Even in a drop of water innumerable buddha lands appear.” The image of many Buddha lands existing in a drop of water felt exactly the same as molecules for me, or sun glints momentarily sparkling on an ocean. Buddha lands can come into existence based on human cooperation and effort. The feeling of delight at this imagery is occurring in the mind of someone who, as a child, would sit and watch the dust particles dance in the sunbeam coming through the front door and experience them as magic. Watching them, I would feel a deep peace and some type of awareness that the world was much more miraculous and vast than our daily lives seemed to suggest. It was magic; not as in something that isn’t real, magic as in something we can’t explain. Zen teaches us that no words can truly explain or describe this reality we get to experience. So ultimately all these words are like the Maps App on our smart phones. The blue line moving along on our phone and the nice lady saying “in 1/4 mile turn left on the next street” is not our actual car moving along the road, or us deciding to turn the steering wheel so the car turns onto that street and moves towards the destination. The Maps App is a wonderful tool to take us places we wouldn’t otherwise know how to get to, but we would never mistake the moving blue image on the screen for our life. Same with the idea of the three bodies of Buddha, or Buddha images or images of molecules for that matter. Their value is in guiding us to experience the indescribable reality of our real life.Suzuki Roshi said, When you have selfish practice, you stick to things which you can see, which you can understand. And when you stick to something which you can understand, you will forget all about what is supporting the understanding, the color or the beautiful shape it has. So instead of being one with a flower, your friend, or your teacher, you will be caught by your teacher, the flower you see, the friend you have, without having a direct intimate relationship. You will make a barrier between you, and what you will see is a dead flower or a wooden teacher. Suzuki Roshi also said, Our practice should be based on the idea of selflessness. This selflessness is very difficult to understand. If you try to be selfless, that is already a selfish idea [laughs]. We don’t know what to do, how to cope with this. Perhaps you have tried various ways, but selflessness is not something which you can try. It should be there when you do not try anything. Selflessness is not something which you can be aware of. But for us, it is necessary to know how difficult it is. Part of how we learn to be selfless is to settle into stillness in zazen. Into our cross roads of threads within the fabric of reality. In the stillness of this body and mind we experience the one body/mind. Then we bring that perspective into our movement and into our day. Sojun Roshi said, In everyday life, meet each situation on its own terms, freshly, wholeheartedly. Refrain from judging, rejecting, demanding, or reacting. For example, when a powerful emotion such as fear presents itself, do not deflect it, analyze it, excuse it, amplify it, suppress it, dismiss it or identify with it. Don’t cut yourself off. If necessary, take a deep breath, relax your abdomen and smooth your brow; but don’t bother to congratulate or console yourself. This is not moving. Thus, the not moving of zazen is continuous with the not moving of everyday life. Paraphrasing the Mountains and Waters Sutra, he then said, “A river flows; a mountain is still. The mountain’s stillness is its flowing. The river’s flowing is its stillness.” A student once said to Suzuki Roshi, “The stream outside Tassajara has been flowing a long time. I wish to ask it now how long and how hard must it flow? Listen.” Suzuki Roshi responded: “If you notice that point, that is Buddha’s sermon.” Reality is ours to experience with this body and mind. The lesson in seeing our own body as the body of Buddha or experiencing the entire universe as the true human body is not about inflating the ego with concepts of grandeur for this small karmic self. If there is any energy of this idea being about the small you or the small individual I -than we have got it terribly wrong.The point is for it to help us get this small limited self out of the way so we can give our best effort as the crossroad of threads that we each are in time and space to relieve suffering. To bring calm, clear mind, and non-fear to a chaotic and frightened world. To do no harm. To be the place where there is harmony between truth and the phenomenal world. And to help us mature towards the bodhisattva ideals in our actual lives. The need is great and the time for it is always now. The Buddha said, “Dear friends, my physical body (rupakaya) will not be here tomorrow, but my teaching body (Dharmakaya) will always be with you. Consider it to be the teacher who never leaves you.” An ancient buddha said: Copyright © 2025 Zenki Kathleen Batson |