Willingness to change
It’s akin to a disaster for a meditator to approach life from fixed viewpoints (attitudes) of knowing, or not-knowing. Both are like a solid walls between the supposed self and everything else “out there”. Knowing pushes a wall onto the world and not-knowing is like a wall that hides from the world, both are two sides of the same problem.
“Buddhism will last as long as bowing lasts”.*
I used to hear this quoted so frequently that, as is often the case, the words just seemed to go in one ear and out the other. The meaning though, is not found in the words, it is found in bowing.
Buddhist practice is a precise discipline of study where body and mind enter into dialogue with the immediate environment and the dynamic unknowable, unfathomable universe. All is made vivid in the interaction. A discipline which is not seeking final results is one in which we are continually changed and in turn change this world. Unknowable and unfathomable does not mean that study is futile, it points to the futility of attempting to fix anything at all into, “It exists” or, “It doesn’t exist”. The Buddha had a thing or two to say about this polarity and it’s consequences.
Bowing has many forms and there are countless opportunities for bowing in a day. This may simply point to an unfathomable freedom, one that cannot be entered without attentive study. From the beginning, a bow is just a bow, even when appearances seem to be suggesting something is missing or stuck. The thing is to keep giving oneself, to investigate bowing in the doing of it, feeling it out, looking, listening, questioning, surrendering judgmental assessments and not avoiding apparent obstacles.
When first given guidance on the practice of seated meditation, people are usually instructed to bow to their sitting place, then to turn and bow outwards, both before and after each sitting period. In following the form, the meaning of bowing can become clear, a discovering of how bowing becomes bowing, even though it is also only always bowing from the beginning. In the following of a form, many appearances of ourselves can show. Actions of body, speech and mind don’t lie, they are like reflections of what is going on ‘inside’ of us, whether some part is being excluded or held onto. When bowing is only bowing, it is wholly inclusive, anything else is indicative of an imagined disconnection, in one way or another showing what bowing is and what it is not.
We don’t bow because someone tells us that is what we must do. We don’t bow to get something right or to achieve some result. Awakening comes from within and within awakening, wholehearted actions leave nothing out. Words cannot possibly adequately describe the depths of this inclusivity. In any moment that we bring bowing into being, whether formally in the ceremony of meditation or inwardly in daily activities, an ease in an inexhaustible connection can be allowed. A connection that is always present because it cannot actually be truly divided, division is a delusive perception. As nothing can really be divided, this connection cancels out even the idea of connection and there is nothing more to say about connection.
When giving introductory instructions for seated meditation, a teacher might point to the respect and gratitude embodied in the forms of sitting and bowing. When respect and gratitude become active respect and gratitude, there is an endless giving and receiving, a reciprocity that dissolves, in detail, the creating of division. This goes largely unnoticed by the discriminatory mind but is nevertheless undeniable in experience.
It’s a self imposed dead end to think that we know what we are doing just as much as it useless to get stuck in thinking that we don’t know. There’s nothing fresh or enlivening to us when we are stubbornly cut off like this in an indivisible universe which is, on every scale, endlessly neither old or new.
If the nature of existence is a reciprocal participation in a kind unfurling, all that we are is already included. It couldn’t be otherwise, yet we have to practice as if it is, for it to be so. In ceaselessly becoming what we are, bowing is essentially the same as the act of walking to the shops to get milk. Walking isn’t dependent on having to arrive somewhere, even as it includes direction, meaning and purpose.
* Attributed to Zen Master Bodhidharma 5th or 6th century CE. I haven’t searched for the source.