Practice Outside the Scriptures
Here goes:
Come practice outside the scriptures.
On Saturday April 6, anyone and everyone who would like to please come to Sweeping Heart Zen and enjoy a Day of Practice. (A detailed schedule and description of the day is here.)
Gather at the Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church (here).
What’s a day of practice all about?
One short answer to that question is it’s all about practicing Zen. What’s practicing Zen? Some people say practicing Zen is practicing the discipline and art of being here now in every moment. And, though being here now is certainly a part of practicing Zen, its not all there is to it.
The First Ancestor of Zen in China, Bodhidharma, said that Zen is,
A special transmission outside the scriptures.
No dependency on words and letters.
Pointing directly to the human mind.
Seeing into one’s nature and attaining Buddhahood.
That is, Bodhidharma said Zen practice is not dependent on studying or filling one’s mind with the lettered lore of the Buddhist tradition. The practice does not depend on elaborate concepts, chanting words, or mastering esoteric arguments.
Bodhidharma’s claim is that Zen practice is a practice that directly points to the human mind, to the content of human experience. This pointing and practice helps one to illuminate one’s own nature—a nature one has direct access to already. And seeing into one’s nature is not mediated by ritual, or priests, or experts of any kind. It is something one may do in the company of others, but one must do it one’s self. It is attaining Buddhahood. That’s the claim.
We might say then, that though the practice of being here now is a necessary condition for attaining Buddhahood, being here now is not a sufficient condition for attaining Buddhahood. An additional, necessary condition for becoming a Buddha is seeing into one’s own true nature.
Zen Buddhists can be surprising.
Actually, I think it’s surprising that most Zen Buddhist I know think that Bodhidharma was expressing a radical and iconoclastic view when he described Zen practice in these terms—“A special transmission (of insight or wisdom or compassion) outside the scriptures, no dependency on words and letters.”—and for his time and role as a Buddhist missionary in China, his message was startling. Yet if you take the long view of the development of the Buddha Way, Bodhidhrama was not one bit radical or iconoclastic. Not in the least. Bodhidharma taught a pure, mainstream Buddhism.
After all, the Buddha did not attain Buddhahood by reading or studying scriptures or by depending on words and concepts. The Buddha became the Buddha by studying nature and his own nature. And, one day, while studying what he could see of himself in seated meditation, he clearly saw into his own nature and the nature of the world–and that seeing is what made him a Buddha.
Yet the truth he saw, and his way of seeing, though these are now pointed to in the scriptures, remain in nature and in the human heart/mind, and these remain outside the scriptures.
And, once the newly Awakened Buddha was able to both personally integrate his Awakening experience and explain his way of liberation to the world, he called that way of looking at himself and the world, and what he saw, the Dharma.
And, we know that it was his teaching of the Dharma that became the content of the scriptures. The scriptures and Zen practice both point to this way of seeing. And they point to what the Buddha and Bodhidharma, and many, many others have seen through the ages, right up to today.
The Buddha himself described the availability and immediacy of his way of pointing to the human mind and seeing into one’s nature this way, “The Dharma is… directly visible, immediate, inviting one to come and see, worthy of application, to be personally experienced by the wise.” ~Angutarra Nikaya 6:10
It’s not far away. Everyone has access to it. It’s right here everyday.
Observing the nature of things.
So, the Day of Practice, with it’s sitting and walking meditation, chanting, cleaning up, and sharing a meal together is set up in a way to help practitioners more easily slow down and relax, so each of us can be here now. And so each of us can observe what is happening on the inside—subjectively– and on the outside—objectively— undividedly and continuously throughout the day.
This undivided and continuous observing the nature of things in the here and now is a fuller, yet not entirely complete understanding of the whole of Zen practice. (Yes! There is a bit more to it, but this is just a blog post and not a book, after all.) Yet, to know about these two facets of Zen and Buddhist practice is more than enough to jump into a day of practice. So, if you’re inclined, please do.
This is how to spend a day of practice.
Dogen Zenji described the task of practice this way, “The task is not something which is to be considered as a temporarily prescribed method of contemplation. And it is not that you should invent something non-existent to think about. [Just observe] the truth in reality right before your eyes.” ~Shobogenzo Zuimonki, translated by Thomas Cleary
This is how to spend a day of practice—steadily, calmly, knowing the changes that are happening on the inside, and on the outside, in every moment. That right there is looking into one’s own nature. In this way, even though we may chant a scripture, a Day of Practice, and every day of practice, is a transmission outside the scriptures.
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And visit a Sweeping Heart Zen event. Here’s a link to our calendar: sweepingheartzen.org/events/
We’re located in historic Gloucester on Cape Ann. Cape Ann is about 40 miles up the coast from Boston on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
