The Eye Of Practice

It seems that these days most of the things I hear and study are pointing in the same direction: 'awakening moment by moment to the reality of life prior to the separation between dichotomies', as Uchiyama Roshi expresses it, or 'mind and dharma are one reality', or 'nowhere-else mind' as I think Baker Roshi put it in his talk. Part of me starts to think, "I wish I had heard this when I started to practise", but probably I did hear it; the teaching has not changed in that time, but my way of relating to it and absorbing it certainly has. I think of some of the things I used to discuss with Paul when I first started meeting him twelve years ago, and some of the things we discuss now, and it is clear that we focus on different things as we continue to practise. As Dogen puts it in the Genjo Koan, "you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach", and part of the teacher's job is to meet you at that level. I have been thinking about the phrase 'luminous mirror wisdom' that we use quite often, in terms of the wisdom to be just a mirror.I was reading a blog post the other day where the author was grappling with rationality, mind, and reality:

"And if all the thoughts and stories in your head - as Zen seems to suggest - are equally meaningless, then so are thoughts about Zen and the thoughts of Zen.  Of course, that is a conclusion that most Zen masters would willingly accept, but it leaves them in a dangerous place, where anything can be said because everything is equally senseless. And that seems to bring Zen perilously close to nihilism, an association that [D.T.] Suzuki is eager to fend off. It's true, he says, that Zen declares that everything is empty, but what emerges when that is realized is joy in the present moment.  But isn't joy in the present moment empty too, bringing us back to nihilism?"

These are deep things to be grappling with; the way I feel this in my life now is that awareness of emptiness does not lead to nihilism, but rather a rootedness in unrootedness. There are no 'stable individual identities' as the author understands and accepts, and being able to accord with this reality does bring a certain ease and joy, which is 'empty' only in the sense it does not have a stable inherent existence, and which is often countered by the stuff our brains starts coming up with to assert otherwise. So which do we trust? The longer I practise, the less I try to listen to constructs of the mind. 'Thoughts about Zen' are basically meaningless; nonetheless they do exist as part of the reality we are experiencing. The trick is being comfortable with both of these things at the same time.
Just in case you have glazed over, some sky pictures from last week, as the sun and fog meet and balance each other:

Monday

Tuesday

Tuesday

Friday

Friday

Saturday