Reiki Help Blog :: Oasis Reiki Dojo

You’re bound to become a buddha if you practice.
If water drips long enough
Even rocks wear through.
It’s not true thick skulls can’t be pierced;
People just imagine their minds are hard.

— Shih-Wu (1272-1352)

Shih-Wu or Stone House was a Chinese Chan (Zen) poet and hermit. He also served as abbot of Fuyuan Temple (near Hangzhou) for eight years.

Bill Porter, who’s lived as a Buddhist monk and translated various works, including Stone House’s poetry says this about him:

… he was one of the exceptional Zen students who became a poet. Stone House had a genius for poetry that is unique. I’ve always said that he was the greatest of all the Chinese Buddhist poets. And although he was a hermit, he was a Zen teacher, too, and he taught individuals through his poetry.

This is why I love wisdom, and the world’s wisdom traditions. Ages before we had terms like ‘brain plasticity,’ ‘neruoplasticity,’ ‘cortical remapping,’ or ‘brain malleability’ there was a Zen poet who already knew, had already experienced it, and was teaching it.

While Shih-Wu was an abbot for some time, he preferred his mountain hut, where he lead a frugal existence. The windows of his hut were made of oiled paper which ripped easily. He ate a wonderful variety of food he farmed himself on terraced banks on his mountain. He built his hut by a spring and as Bill Porter who has visited the site relates: “The spring was still flowing right behind the hut, the only spring on the mountain.” He had a few possessions, some tools and kitchenware.

Today, neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life, is seen and measured with sophisticated technology such as PET scans and MRIs. These technologies cost in the tens of thousands.

I don’t want to dwell on that so much. I want to dwell on the teaching.

I’ve always been an advocate of practice-based spirituality. Not sermon-based, not book learning, not intellectual grasp of truths. Not the surface inspiration of a quote, not the spiritual catchphrase. Not talk only. Spirituality has to be a part of us. Not a garment that comes on and off. Not an appendage. But a part of our being.

Spirituality must be embodied to be true and real, and indeed give its gifts. The best and most effective way for spirituality to be embodied is by practice.

This isn’t the practice of ‘practice makes perfect,’ it isn’t the ‘best practices’ of business, nor a drill, or social observance.

As Shih-Wu indicates, it isn’t even a practice to better yourself, improve skills, get over an emotional hump, lose weight or develop a character quality. It’s of an utterly boundless order. There isn’t even a box here.

He’s talking about being a ‘buddha.’ No, not that guy! Well, alright, he’s a good model. He’s talking about you. He’s talking about being awake, which is what ‘buddha’ means.

Buddha means “awake one.” Awake to what? That can be answered in many ways. Let’s stay with the poem. Awake to nonphysicality. If rocks are some of the most solid things we know, and they can be worn down, is there any reality and permanence to matter? Whoa, now Shih-Wu is dancing at the quantum level. Wait, when did he live?! Matter isn’t fixed to a single state.

I love the humor too. He knows we’re thick-headed. He also knows that’s an illusion. Fact is, the mind is bendable. It can be bent to wisdom and compassion. It can be bent to the heart where it becomes heartmind. The mind can be informed by sources other than the brain’s processing. And it’s also not fixed to a single state or pattern.

How? Practice. Shih-Wu also knew that the mind is nonlocal. It’s not not only limited to the brain, it’s not limited to geography, time or  habit. Bill Porter again:

By staying up on his mountain, he was able to affect the course of Zen in Korea. A prominent Korean monk came and studied with him at his hermitage and then took the robe and bowl of Stone House back to his country and established the Chogye Order, Korea’s main Zen tradition.

That’s quite something from a man who wore simple robes made of mulberry paper or lotus leaves in the summer, and a sturdy hemp most other times.

As he says:

Nothing is better than being free
but getting free is not luck.

So. Practice. I’ll see you there.

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Here’s a great thought:

How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself anything less than a god. — Alan Watts

The short answer is that what we experience through the five senses is limited and often misleading. In his lecture for being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata in part said:

The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless, with his eyes closed. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless […] The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment through his own efforts. And the emphasis is less upon reason and argument than upon intuition, immediate feeling. Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in “the discarding of words,” it lies “outside words.” And so we have the extreme of “silence like thunder,” in the Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra. Tradition has it that Bodhidharma, a southern Indian prince who lived in about the sixth century and was the founder of Zen in China, sat for nine years in silence facing the wall of a cave, and finally attained enlightenment. The Zen practice of silent meditation in a seated posture derives from Bodhidharma.

The five senses are highly conditioned. They perceive through multiple filters: Our childhood, parents and family, culture and religion, peers, and our own wounds as well as biases, often based on wounds. The senses which inform the brain, and the brain directly are influenced very powerfully by the accepted and promoted version of “reality” we’re educated into. A “reality” the senses verify because they are constantly turned outward.

The only real way out of this conundrum is silence. Silence is at our core. If we stop we can reacquaint ourselves with it. The outer world is noisy and busy. Our senses are trapped in the noise and busyness. But those aren’t our real nature.

“Buddha-nature, the essence of awakened enlightenment itself, is present in everyone. Its essence is forever pure, unalloyed, and flawless. It is beyond increase or decrease. It is neither improved by remaining in nirvana nor degenerated by straying into samsara. Its fundamental essence is forever perfect, unobscured, quiescent, and unchanging. Its expressions are myriad.” — Nyoshul Khenpo Rinpoche

Meditation nowadays has become a marketplace item, like everything else. A relaxation or guided meditation CD, going to the beach, swinging in a hammock, listening to running water all dim the input of the senses, or rather access the senses’ inner counterparts. These are all good places to start. It has to be emphasized that the seduction of the senses turned outward is overpowering. To break this hold needs a more serious method and its engagement.

Meditation reveals the silence within. Meditation reveals that the five senses have subtle counterparts that access silence and everything it is. Meditation reveals that silence is an abode, constant and eternal. Meditation reveals truth. Meditation is respite from the racing mind. Meditation is unlearning.

Meditation, simply defined, is a way of being aware. It is the happy marriage of doing and being. It lifts the fog of our ordinary lives to reveal what is hidden; it loosens the knot of self-centeredness and opens the heart; it moves us beyond mere concepts to allow for a direct experience of reality. Meditation embodies the way of awakening: both the path and its fruition. From one point of view, it is the means to awakening; from another, it is awakening itself. — Lama Surya Das

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The hara is central to Reiki practice. Unlike the chakras, it’s more difficult to find information about it, although authentic Reiki Training will provide the necessary knowledge. The hara is best understood in the experience of one’s regular practice.  And while the chakras are mentioned below, Far Eastern understanding of subtle anatomy is based on the hara, not the Hindu chakras.

The following is taken from The Three Pillars of Zen, compiled and edited by Philip Kapleau, a seminal work on Zen Buddhism. While there are certain references specific to Zen, the appeal of the hara and its cultivation is obvious.

Hara literally denotes the stomach and abdomen and the functions of digestion, absorption, and elimination connected with them. But it has parallel psychic¹ and spiritual significance. According to Hindu and Buddhist yogic systems, there are a number of psychic centers in the body through which vital cosmic force or energy flows. Of the two such centers embraced within the hara, one is associated with the solar plexus, whose system of nerves governs the digestive processes and organs of elimination. Hara is thus a wellspring of vital psychic energies. Harada-roshi, one of the most celebrated Zen masters of his day,in urging his disciples to concentrate their mind’seye (i.e., the attention, the summation point of the total being) in their hara, would declare: “You must realize”—i.e., make real—”that the center of the universe is the pit of your belly!

To facilitate his experience of this fundamental truth, the Zen novice is instructed to focus his mind constantly at the bottom of his hara (specifically, between the navel and the pelvis) and to radiate all mental and bodily activities from that region. With the body-mind’s equilibrium centered in the hara, gradually a seat of consciousness, a focus of vital energy, is established there which influences the entire organism.

That consciousness is by no means confined to the brain is shown by Lama Govinda, who writes as follows: “While, according to Western conceptions, the brain is the exclusive seat of consciousness, yogic experience shows that our brain-consciousness is only one among a number of possible forms of consciousness, and that these, according to their function and nature, can be localized or centered in various organs of the body. These ‘organs,’ which collect, transform, and distribute the forces flowing through them, are called cakras, or centers of force. From them radiate secondary streams of psychic force, comparable to the spokes of a wheel, the ribs of an umbrella, or the petals of a lotus. In other words, these cakras are the points in which psychic forces and bodily functions merge into each other or penetrate each other. They are the focal points in which cosmic and psychic energies crystallize into bodily qualities, and in which bodily qualities are dissolved or transmuted again into psychic forces.

Settling the body’s center of gravity below the navel, that is, establishing a center of consciousness in the hara, automatically relaxes tensions arising from the habitual hunching of the shoulders, straining of the neck, and squeezing in of the stomach. As this rigidity disappears, an enhanced vitality and new sense of freedom are experienced throughout the body and mind, which are felt more and more to be a unity.

Zazen (meditation) has clearly demonstrated that with the mind’s eye centered in the hara the proliferation of random ideas is diminished and the attainment of one-pointedness accelerated, since a plethora of blood from the head is drawn down to the abdomen, “cooling” the brain and soothing the autonomic nervous system. This in turn leads to a greater degree of mental and emotional stability. One who functions from his hara, therefore, is not easily disturbed. He is, moreover, able to act quickly and decisively in an emergency owing to the fact that his mind, anchored in his hara, does not waver.

With the mind in the hara, narrow and egocentric thinking is superseded by a broadness of outlook and a magnanimity of spirit. This is because thinking from the vital hara center, being free of mediation by the limited discursive intellect, is spontaneous and all embracing. Perception from the hara tends toward integration and unity rather than division and fragmentation. In short, it is thinking which sees things steadily and whole.

The figure of the Buddha seated on his lotus throne—serene, stable, all-knowing and all-encompassing, radiating boundless light and compassion—is the foremost example of hara expressed through perfect enlightenment. Rodin’s “Thinker,” on the other hand, a solitary figure “lost” in thought and contorted in body, remote and isolated from his Self, typifies the opposite state.

¹ “Psychic” here does not relate to extrasensory phenomena or powers but to energies and body-mind states which cannot be classified either as physiological or psychological.

Serene Buddha and The Thinker

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And now for a completely different tradition of poetry and spirituality; a little haiku and Zen. When you get down to it though, the truths are the same. Different flavors of ice cream are still ice cream.

I’ve featured the haiku of Mitsu Suzuki here before. She wasn’t only a haiku poet, but wife to Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and with him played an important role in bringing Zen Buddhism to North America. First a couple of her haiku written in the summer months, then a spiritual teaching from Suzuki Roshi based on his visit to Yosemite National Park.

by RobW

Too small
to call it a Zen garden
moss blossoms
—
Gardenia’s
whiteness remains
the night is complete

——

I went to Yosemite National Park, and I saw some huge waterfalls. The highest one there is 1,340 feet high, and from it the water comes down like a curtain thrown from the top of the mountain. It does not seem to come down swiftly, as you might expect; it seems to come down very slowly because of the distance. And the water does not come down as one stream, but is separated into many tiny streams. From a distance it looks like a curtain. And I thought it must be a very difficult experience for each drop of water to come down from the top of such a high mountain. It takes time, you know, a long time, for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. We have many difficult experiences in our life. But at the same time, I thought, the water was not originally separated, but was one whole river. Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. It is as if the water does not have any feeling of being separate when it is one whole river. Only when divided into many drops can it begin to have or express some separate feeling.

Before we were born we had no such feeling; we were one with the universe. This is called ‘mind-only,’ or ‘essence of mind,’ or ‘big mind.’ After we are separated by birth from this oneness, as the water falling from the waterfall is separated by the wind and rocks, then we have such feelings. And you have difficulty because of such feelings. You attach to the feeling you have without knowing just how this kind of feeling is created. When you do not realize that you are one with the river, or one with the universe, you have fear. Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing. When we realize this fact, we have no fear of death anymore and we have no actual difficulty in our life.

— Shunryu Suzuki Roshi

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The series on time and its paradox continues. Let’s put the spiritual aspect of time aside for a moment. Even when dealing with common calendars, we see that time isn’t always what it seems. Most of you reading this celebrate New Year’s on December 31st. Yet in India the Vedic New Year is marked when the Sun transitions into Aries, the first sign of the zodiac. In 2010 this going to happen on April 14th. Aren’t you relieved? Now you can really get to work on your resolutions, you just bought time!

Time seems to be malleable, even when it seems to exist. The ancient Greeks had a special way of looking at this; they had two words for time, kronos and kairos. Kronos or Father Time refers to chronological or sequential time. Kairos signifies a time in between, a moment of undetermined length in which something special happens. Kronos measures, it goes tick tock and is quantitative. Kairos is qualitative in nature, it flows.

Kairos brings meaning because it’s accessed in those moments we transcend the finiteness of time.

When we participate in time and therefore lose our sense of time passing we are in kairos; here we are totally absorbed in the present moment, which may actually stretch out over hours. –Jean Shinoda Bolen

It’s unlikely that Dali was in kronos time when painting his famous canvas.

The ‘now’ moment is creative and fathomless. It’s where we live out our passion and purpose. We get to express our true self and touch a depth that exists perennially. Now is like a great river. It flows with the totality of cosmic and human experience. When it’s tapped, that totality is available to the individual, who brings another stream to it, and so it goes on.

How can you deepen your presence in now? Journal using the following prompts. Remember to let your thoughts, feelings and intuitions surface on the page without being censored.

• What makes me regularly feel I’ve stepped outside of time?
• What does it feel like when I’m engaged in this?
• How do I lose my sense of flow?
• How can I bring flow even to routine activities?
• Who’s with me when I step out of time?
• Who pulls me back into time?
• How does now enhance my contribution to the world?
• What would I be living if I didn’t have responsibilities in time?
• How can I live my essence while in time?

I am letting go of my idea of time. I see that eternal life is not a question of “I will be forever,” but of “Now I am.” Eternity is time dying in me. –Jean Lanier

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