How Do We Practice With The Pain Of Social Division?

So,

Here we are in this wonderful online cocoon,

This little bubble of ours,

And today I wanted to investigate together a koan that I think is perhaps rather timely,

Given everything that's happening in the world,

But it is a koan about the sixth patriarch.

Many centuries ago,

It's from the collection The Gateless Gate,

It's case 29,

And it's about Huineng.

I'll read the koan and then we can investigate it together.

Two monks were arguing about the temple flag waving in the wind.

One said,

The flag moves.

The other said,

The wind moves.

They argued back and forth but could not agree.

The sixth ancestor,

Huineng,

Said,

Gentlemen,

It is not the wind that moves,

It is not the flag that moves,

It is your mind that moves.

The two monks were struck with awe.

And now I'll read you the verse that Master Mumon wrote when he put this in his collection of The Gateless Gate.

The verse is,

Wind,

Flag,

Mind,

Move,

All the same fallacy,

Only knowing how to open their mouths,

Not knowing they had fallen into chatter.

So,

Perhaps this resonates for you in some parts of your life.

It certainly does for me.

But a little background on Huineng,

He was the sixth patriarch,

Meaning the sixth in line of Chan Buddhism after Bodhidharma.

And he is the one who's really credited with making Zen Zen,

Giving Chan this special character by kind of fusing together Chinese Taoism and the Buddhism of Bodhidharma that he brought from India.

And at this time,

According to the story,

Huineng wasn't recognized in China as a great master.

He wasn't much of a teacher.

He had studied under a teacher who saw that he was quite gifted,

And the teacher said to Huineng,

Why don't you go away for about 10 years and sit all by yourself and ripen your understanding?

And so,

That's what he did.

He went away from monasteries and temples,

And particularly,

He went away and separated himself from the many sectarian conflicts going on in Buddhism at that time in China.

People were arguing with each other about so many fine points of Buddhism.

So he goes away,

And then he comes back into the world after 10 years.

And he was kind of a nobody.

And one of the first things that happens to him,

According to this story,

Is he runs into these two young monks bickering over what they thought was a really important point of understanding.

Is it the wind that moves,

Or is it the flag that moves?

And they couldn't agree.

Well,

How much does that sound like what's going on in our world,

In our communities,

Maybe in our homes,

And certainly in our minds?

And so,

Why this koan?

Why has it lasted?

Well,

We can see why it has endured for centuries,

Because it captures something that is so innate to those of us who have heart-minds,

All of us,

All of us human beings.

The koan asks us to look at these arguments,

At these struggles for ideas that will win out over other ideas,

Understanding that is correct,

And how we can fall into the trap of trying to vanquish each other with our ideas.

And of course,

What this is about is what Zen talks about as the duality,

That the mind is constantly endeavoring to create.

This versus that,

Right and wrong.

You know,

This tendency toward black and white thinking is what practice is designed to break down.

So,

We sit here today investigating deeply,

Not investigating our thoughts,

Investigating the breath moving in and out of the body,

Investigating the faint sound of the pulse in our ears,

Investigating what the air feels like on our skin.

This is not subject to right or wrong,

Correct understanding or incorrect understanding.

It is becoming intimate with what is,

And that is the heart of practice.

And of course,

It's rarely encountered as we chant in the verse of the Kesa.

How many people do this?

How many people spend an entire Saturday investigating what a cushion feels like on the butt,

What the floor feels like under my feet?

And yet,

What Zen has taught for centuries is that this is the way to true understanding,

To true liberation,

And that otherwise we are those two young monks fighting over nothing.

Perhaps you've had the experience of a falling out with someone that doesn't go away.

Family feuds tear families apart,

And actually now more than ever,

Politics is tearing families apart.

Issues of right and wrong and needing to vanquish the other.

And in fact,

There are many stories of feuds that go on between families or within families for decades,

Sometimes for centuries,

Until people look back and they can't remember what the original argument was about.

The mind falls into these dualisms,

And they are a source of enormous suffering.

And so,

In our reading,

It cautions us to see beyond these dualities,

Beyond the belief that we need to answer a question,

That our practice is not about replacing a set of incorrect ideas with a set of correct ideas.

Our practice is about knowing whether the water is warm or cold because we taste it,

Really taste it.

When we investigate anything,

The duality breaks down.

Think about just the term black and white,

Thinking in black and white terms.

Black and white are not real.

There are infinite shades of white.

Ask any artist about the infinite shades of black,

And then the mind says,

What about not killing?

What about not lying?

These have to be absolutes.

And yet,

Of course,

We know that even the bodhisattva precepts,

Which we study,

Are not absolutes.

And we teach these are not the Ten Commandments because no precept is possible to keep absolutely.

Because the dualisms that our minds create cannot hold when we put them next to the reality of just this,

Of just the infinite varying circumstances of our life.

And so,

What we find is that it is not this talk that is the practice.

Yes,

It is one way into the Dharma,

But I'm using ideas.

I'm talking in terms that involve dualities.

Everything we read,

Everything we chant,

Is pointing us away from the mind that creates dualisms and toward our experience,

Toward the infinite richness and complexity of our experience.

So,

How do we practice with this?

I mean,

All we have to do is look at news to see delusive certainty everywhere,

To see dualism that cause people to kill each other,

That cause people to hate each other,

That cause people to feel alone and isolated.

And so,

When we say that this work,

This practice that we're doing here today,

Is the most important work of our lives,

That is not a platitude.

If we do this and if others do this work,

Then we see beyond dualism.

We see beyond these labels that are so imperfect and in fact cause so much suffering.

I mean,

I find one particular issue right now so exemplary,

This issue of gender,

Because there are people who are terrified at the idea of gender not being binary,

Not being a this or a that.

And it really comes out of fear.

But what if the truth of existence is that we all show up with all kinds of senses of ourselves in the world,

Not reducible to black or white,

To this or that.

The mind craves certainty and the mind falls into fear when that certainty isn't available.

And so,

We watch ourselves arguing about things that in the deepest sense don't matter.

Now,

That is at the level of form.

The two monks watching the flag,

Talking about the wind and the flag,

Those two monks are there in the world of form,

In the world of objects,

Of this and that.

But what this koan also points us to is the world of oneness,

Of emptiness.

That in fact,

Every time we give a label,

We have reduced the world,

We have made a map,

We have diminished the richness of just this.

Flag,

Wind,

How can we say they're separate?

How can we say that the infinite causes and conditions that allow us all to appear on this screen right this moment put us into separate boxes when we are so connected in heart and mind?

And so,

What the koan is also pointing us to is the beauty of not reducing our world to the labels created by the thinking mind,

This labeling machine that is so helpful in certain ways and yet deadening,

Numbing,

Stultifying in the way that labels take us away from the magnificence of the play of light through the window,

The puzzling nature of the chirping bird that won't stop outside my window.

And so,

What this koan does and why it has lasted so long is that it first points to the mind's capacity to divide us from each other about matters of no consequence,

Inviting us to see through that and inviting us to see the poverty of the labels that the thinking mind maps on to the world.

And so,

As the teaching goes,

True freedom requires us to bring forth the mind that abides nowhere.

There is no final word,

There is no final answer because anything that we claim to be final reduces us in our Buddha nature and it reduces our ability to comprehend the magnificence of what is all around us appearing and disappearing in each moment.

And so,

Back to Muman's verse,

Wind,

Flag,

Mind,

Moving,

All equally to blame.

Only knowing how to open his mouth unaware of his fault in talking.

Even to speak of this makes us fall into a diminishment of what is so beautiful in each moment.

And so,

I invite us all today to see through the dualities,

To see beyond the thinking mind and to let ourselves sink more deeply into the experience of one complete nature.

Thank you.