Mudra: The Authentic Seal of Awareness

Today’s entry is my contribution to the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Hands.

This posterized photo is the hand gesture of the Buddhist practice of awareness. Shunryu Suzuki Roshi called it the cosmic mudra.

I have always understood the definition of gesture to be a motion of the hand or hands. I have resisted using the term when I demonstrate and describe the mudra during meditation instruction, because there is no movement expected once the hands are placed. Instead, I describe the mudra as a hand position.

Looking up the word gesture, I see now that its archaic definition refers to carriage corresponding to the state of mind. This discovery brings a smile, though awareness is not a state of mind. Awareness is openness; life not crimped by held assumptions.

Awareness is first, original; the base and whole of experience. Assumptions are interpretations of this direct experience.

An obsolete definition of gesture refers to the position or attitude [of the hands] especially in prayer, a tip-off to the word’s religious roots. Is Buddhism a religion? That’s a topic for a future post. Meditation is far from the popular understanding of prayer (to ask, entreat, or implore). If prayer is to live as open response (“how can I help?” rather than “please, may I have?”) then this obsolete definition brings a smile, as well. Mudra; the expression of open response.

The cosmic mudra hand gesture is stationary, but expresses the life of wholeness, openness, spontaneity, fluidity. To fill this hand gesture with awareness is authentic practice. Our peonies burst into full bloom today. To flower, to open, to respond to sunlight, is the mudra of peony. A flower does not put partial effort into its aliveness. To fulfill the life of the zazen posture—including the cosmic mudra—is the authentic seal of awareness.

© Bev Forsman and Letters from Emptiness, 2010–2012. If you share this material, please include direction to the original content. Thank you.

What is a Zen Center?

What is a Zen center? A community that invites and encourages inquiry. As practitioners of Zen, we are invited to look at our assumptions, see that we believe them to be absolutely true, see that they do not correspond to life unfolding, and find liberation in realizing assumptions are empty.

How does this invitation manifest?

Our teachers guide us as they live their lives as expressions of knowing, and they remind us to keep our practice pure.

Our practice guides us as we breathe life into the effort that is awareness.

Our community guides us as we navigate the formalities of meditation hall etiquette while discovering the spontaneity of response that is exactly compassion.

Our conditioned lives guide us as we realize the manifestation of the unconditioned.

Our teachers, our practice, our community, our lives, are not really ours; but are expressions of wholeness. A Zen center is an expression of wholeness that supports the practice of awareness.

© Bev Forsman and Letters from Emptiness, 2010–2012. If you share this material, please include direction to the original content. Thank you.

Time Ripening

To count the breath in zazen with wholeheartedness is to let time ripen.
—Dainin Katagiri roshi

Typically we understand zazen as an activity (or non-activity) that we engage in at a certain time and place. Yes, we learn that it’s important to keep a regular, scheduled sitting practice, otherwise the ordinary life of preference overtakes the effort and aspiration. But awareness meditation, or zen, or to realize and live time ripening, is not limited to a certain time, place, or posture. Time ripening is available constantly in the very activities of everydayness. In fact, this unwavering availability is possible because time ripening’s expression is the relative world of this and that.

With open curiosity, we can discover that the structure of an independent me that is separate from a world out there is an elaborate fabrication. Seeing the insubstantial nature of this constructed view is, at once, liberation. Indeed, it can be known directly that we appear thoroughly dependent upon everything that we are not. Totality or wholeness illuminates as this experience of what seems like me separate from you.

It’s difficult to find this knowing, however, because the fabricated structure is our truth and includes a storyline that, through its mesmerizing affect, holds us hostage. Seemingly. We live as if inside a span of time that is based on self-drama. From this profoundly mistaken point of view, the true revealing of this here/now life is overlooked. We don’t see the fabrication. We miss the total flow and undulation of wholeness which is fabrication’s essence.

I have enjoyed the free fall ride of Valleyfair’s Power Tower countless times. On one occasion it was pouring rain. I rode down with the rain!

The ride gently sends us enthusiasts 275 feet straight up. Strapped safely into our chairs, we sit suspended for a few seconds at the top, until the magnets holding us in position are suddenly deactivated. We are thrust downward faster than free-fall, racing past raindrops. Though they are falling, they look as though shooting upward. Our seats are sent up high again, but this next journey down only gravity is in charge. Free-fall. Raindrops float, illuminated, before us. The life of falling rain is revealed. The raindrops are experienced as they are. That we are neither ahead of nor behind them, is truly breathtaking and is a beautiful analogy of time ripening.

Wholeheartedly following the breath in zazen, time ripening can be known. Wholeheartedly maintaining upright posture, time ripening can be known. Without the labels of me and my breathing, life is illumined. Everything experienced is realized totality. Forgotten is the attachment to the drama ahead, the drama of past, or the drama of what’s-in-it-for-me-now. And away from the cushion, time ripening is simply wholehearted everyday activity.

Life is revealing, manifesting naturally, constantly, regardless of the thoughts, beliefs, or formulas that would hijack its vibrancy. True life, the life that is time ripening, is never somewhere else, even while in the cloak of drama. Are we open enough, within this drama, to take a look?

© Bev Forsman and Letters from Emptiness, 2010–2012. If you share this material, please include direction to the original content. Thank you.

Unlocatable Self

The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge: Distorted, was the inspiration for this post.

Any frozen or fixed view of Reality is distortion.

Awakening is realizing this.

In our ignorance, we live life based on “snapshots” which become formulas to live (or die) by. Ignorance is suffering.

© Bev Forsman and Letters from Emptiness, 2010–2012. If you share this material, please include direction to the original content. Thank you.

Not to Attach is the Way of Peace

The Buddha realized directly that a discrete, independent, persisting self cannot be found. Delusion is simply not having realized what The Buddha realized. Delusion is living the unrecognized assumption that life revolves around a discrete, independent, persisting self.

Simply to believe and attach to the idea of a persistent self is to live life filled with craving and dissatisfaction. Unwittingly holding this fundamental belief, our actions perpetuate and radiate turmoil, as we try to bring our individual ideas of right and wrong to the world of many ideas.

We typically assume we can bring peace by lobbying for changes that match our beliefs, explanations, or philosophies about life. We have taken our formulas about life as absolute truth, and we attempt to make the world bend to those held formulas. This is already to stray from peace.

Each of us has the capacity to realize exactly what The Buddha realized. To thoroughly recognize our identification with this fabricated self, is to be released from the turmoil of craving and dissatisfaction. We can, just like The Buddha, realize directly the fluidity of reality from which the illusion of separateness arises. From this knowing of wholeness and non-separation, activity is manifested as a life of open response (rather than personal-agenda-response). With this knowing, activity attends to the life of All-Beings, which is none other than this life, here/now.

Not to attach to a self is exactly not to stray from peace.

© Bev Forsman and Letters from Emptiness, 2010–2012. If you share this material, please include direction to the original content. Thank you.

Fingering “me”

I saw him again this morning on the sidewalk with his dog on a leash. Last week, he gave me the finger as I drove by. It is the memory of my reaction to that hand gesture, that I write about today.

As I drove down the street that morning, there was an awareness of their presence ahead—a man and a large golden dog with a red bandana around its neck. It was a cold, cold morning, 12 degrees or so I think. The quick movement of his arm stole my attention from the intention to get home to the refuge of warmth. His middle finger was straight up as we made eye contact.

Whew-ee! Immediately a cacophony of thoughts and emotions arose. Me? What did I do? Why is he upset!? I heard the roar of my accelerating engine in the memory of my most recent, but previously overlooked experience. I had been so focused on my intent to get home, that I hadn’t realized how my actions had manifested in the pressing down of the gas pedal. I may have been going too fast. Dang it, I may have been speeding! Am I a speeder? Maybe he doesn’t realize my car has a loud engine. Sometimes I think my car sounds like I’m taking off on a runway at MSP; that could sound like speeding. Maybe the guy is just overly sensitive…

It’s difficult to be completely responsible for what we do when we are attached to an identity. We spend our whole lives building ourselves into a particular “self.” We believe we are the sum of amalgamated experiences, reactions to those experiences, and the conclusions about them. When others believe us to be someone different from the particular “me” that we have fabricated and identified with, we take offense. At times, we may attempt to change how they’ve characterized us, by explaining our behavior as unusual. “We are acting out of character,” we say. We try to “correct” their views of us in order to feel settled.

But who we are in any particular moment/situation is completely dependent upon the moment/situation, including our current emotional state, life’s experiences, the reactions, conclusions, and recollections (more accurately termed recompositions). Recomposing is constantly in flux. Assessments and emotions are constantly in flux. Even defining where an event “begins” or “ends” can give us a different take on whether a situation is “good” or “bad.” Reality is complete and total fluidity. Suffering arises when inserting a “self” to this fluidity. Once attachment to “who I am” is in operation, the whole of our life’s actions is aimed at pleasing, preserving, and protecting that held identity.

When someone gives us the finger or gets angry, or a situation isn’t to our liking, we look to blame someone or something “out there” because we want to be relieved of the pain. But we forget to look right here. We forget about the self-defense mechanism. It is there, in our expectations that “life should bend to our desires,” that we find pain. We don’t look for blame right here, but we have the opportunity to, at once, discover our folly and find clarity.

Back to our story, as immediately as the habitual, defensive thoughts had arisen, they ceased. In the same way that a daydream suddenly vanishes, all that mattered was to carry on with life as it was appearing now. The thoughts and emotions had been seen through—as empty, illusory manifestations of reality. Having been caught by them, life had been lived defensively. Now liberated from their seeming hold on my actions, life is carried out without a trace of self. Actions no longer emanate from desire.

The mechanism of grasping at a self (which ultimately cannot be found) is ever possible. When in operation, the fluidity that is the present unfolding, is being overlooked, and life is painful. When we are caught, we don’t know being caught. But any noticed sensation (sensing is only experienced now) can be the release from the grasped concept of “me” and its drama. Any realized sense can be the gateless gate of Awakening.

© Bev Forsman and Letters from Emptiness, 2010–2012. If you decide to share this material, please include direction to the original content. Thank you.

What to Make of Taking Life

Last week I had the inspiration to write about a subtlety of meaning in a phrase. I wanted to convey an unconventional but all-or-nothing understanding of the first Buddhist Precept: A follower of the Way does not take life.

I wrote and edited for an hour, stalling out with over clarification. I could not get to my main point. So involved was I, in covering all the off-shoots that would provide ballast, that the work lost all life. I had taken the life right out of it.

So, I tried again the next day—a new approach, hopefully learning from my missteps of the day before. Major loss of life again.

Writing is such a difficult task because of the self-editing that occurs as the pencil is drawn along the page or the fingers pause repeatedly on the keyboard. Everyone who writes knows there seems to be so much at stake. The piece must be clear. It must flow. It must be informative. It must be interesting. Clever. Concise. Grammatically correct. Add or subtract a few attributes depending upon your purpose, your topic, your audience. Hold these ideas as present-time judgment, and the writing is not real, not fluid, not alive.

This can be obvious in the writing process, but what about the self-editing that is hiding in our everyday activities? How concerned with ourselves are we as we navigate the world? Do we try to steer and shape conversations? Do we offer help to others with insistence that we know what’s best for them? When we pass along information, do we shave off a bit of truth or embellish with a bit of me-ness? Paying attention to our actions we can become familiar with our editing-for-the-benefit-of-ego behavior. We discover that we take life as soon as we attach to ego. Attaching to ego is to take life.

We all know to the bone, the pain of realizing we’ve hurt someone. This knowing and feeling the pain of ego-driven action can bring about transformation. If ego doesn’t step right back in to make excuses, the responsibility of all actions becomes crystal clear. The ego has dissolved and a natural shift in behavior occurs. A spontaneity to tend to the life of all beings blooms.

We live in the world of relationship whether ego-centric or not. With armor of ego, our actions could be called taking of life. With open interest, open listening, ego does not manifest and limit appropriate response. Compassion transforms from our idea of compassion, to responsive compassion. There is no ego (to be) at risk. Aliveness is at risk. A follower of the Way does not take life.

Ultimately life cannot be taken. Life would have to be a thing, have a particular location, and be separate from us. True life (what is that? breathe, look, listen). True life is not a thing and cannot be taken by a persistent, separate entity known as me. However, life understood that way, is exactly as if taken away. When following the Way there is no taking life.

What is the Way? The Way is not a path. The Way is thorough, complete immersion in this activity. So complete is the participation that ego, ego-agenda, and ego-action have completely ceased. Ego is a fabrication, and this is known without doubt. The Way is life life-ing.*

*Life life-ing a phrase used by Dainin Katagiri.

© Bev Forsman and Letters from Emptiness, 2010–2012. If you decide to share this material, please include direction to the original content. Thank you.