On the Remaining Lectures

While my blogging on my new meditation practice as well as on my reading of The Three Pillars of Zen had ceased completely, my practice had not quite. I have finished reading the twelve lectures of Yasutani-roshi and practiced meditation, though not everyday. Indeed, as Momma Zen, I believe, has noted, it is harder to find 5 minutes a day to meditate than it is to actually meditate. I try to meditate at night but have found that, while the house is relatively quiet, it is not a distraction-less time: Mama moves around the house, the cats come awake, there are things to do before tomorrow that were not done today, tiredness from the day seeps in, etc. But mornings aren't an option, as they start when the kids wake up. But I've been trying, and find that I am better at counting my breaths and can get further along but am still easily pulled out of meditation by the sounds around me (and then cannot get started back again easily once the "mood," so to speak has been broken).

Of the second half of the lectures, I found several of them beyond my current practice needs but informational. For instance, Lecture 6 discusses individual instruction, or dokusan, with a teacher, its purposes, even its rituals. As I am not yet prepared for individual instruction, while I found it interesting to read, it didn't help in my meditating. I'm also still counting breaths the original way, starting on the exhale, counting in and out, and haven't yet progressed to the other techniques of counting only exhalations, and then only inhalations. No rush, though.

However, the parable of Enyadatta (who one day believes she has discovered that she doesn't have a head and must be convinced by friends and her own experience that she does until she comes to realize her head was always there and how happy that makes her) in lecture 8 really clarified for me the faith of Buddhism, specifically the existence of the true Buddha nature in everyone even before it is realized and the then the process of realization through zazen. Of course, it is an article of faith--one of the three essentials of Zen practice described in lecture 11--that enlightenment, Buddha nature, and the perfection of the world even exist. I'm not sure if I believe in a Buddha nature or in enlightenment, which is why I fall on the lower part of the aspirational scale of lecture 12, where people are either ignorant or uninterested in the religion of Buddhism or only pursuing Buddhism for health; I'm one of those "between the first and second classes" that Yasutani-roshi labels curious. I'm exploring Buddhism while beginning the practice without faith. This had concerned me, as I don't want to treat it as just another technique to be consumed by a curious colonialist "other," but I am reassured that the Buddha and I "stand on the same ground. Zazen is the practice of realizing it."

Finally, while reading lecture 10--on cause and effect, one-ness and differentiation (that's actually lectures 9 and 10, which I found the richest for me right now but also the hardest to pinpoint; they bear re-reading several times and so I won't say much about them here now)--I just kept singing Donovan's "There is a Mountain" song, as I read, "all of nature, mountains and rivers, are seen as oneself." Of course, singing the chorus "first there is a mountain, then there is no moutain, then there is" over and over again is not quite conducive to my practice. Which is why I'm still practicing.