Stages
If you think of practice in the sense of a verb, then it’s an activity. The activity of practice is the giving of yourself to respecting (being attentive to), allowing for and immersing yourself in, your true nature. Your true nature manifests as you are respecting and loving it. The meaning of true nature is also like a verb, it is not a thing at all but a vivid coming together that cannot ever be your possession. The meaning of Buddha nature, true nature, is not – your happy place, or a force, or a divine spark deep within you. True self is altogether everything that makes you what you are, including activity and actions. Inside and out, there is nothing static or isolated anywhere.
If practice then is the doing your life (no, not the dreadful – ‘you do you’), practice cannot be external to yourself, so the idea of practice can fall away while the meaning remains. This falling away is an aspect of faith in practice, it is a joyful living that is not a high but a quiet joy of inclusive, active sufficiency, that goes way beyond ups and downs.
There are numerous references to this falling away in Buddhist teachings. In the Lankavatara Sutra it talks of how we can get stuck in the idea (perception) of ‘being a practitioner who does a practice’, no matter if we are a beginner or a seasoned meditator who has done a lot of work on themselves, this being stuck limits the wisdom of our heart-mind. In measuring and polishing our attainments, or seeking something that we perceive we lack, we are unwittingly imposing restrictions on ourselves. In another text, a well known disciple of the Buddha, Sariputra, is quoted as saying, ‘I don’t have a practice’. Sariputra’s daily monastic discipline may well have suggested otherwise to someone watching him. For himself, he would have been just living, his body and mind freeing itself from the restrictions of discriminative thought. This freedom takes place in the real world of forms, disciplines and specifics, it is not a vague cloud and so we can have words that describe and point to practice-awakening, we can have forms of practice. Practice – experience itself though, is where the meaning of concepts permeates body and mind and we are no longer being misled by words or by forms. To realize this, we have to look carefully and closely at what we are doing with our minds.
Examples of people of who gave their lives to the way, speak of them just being vitally themselves and nothing more. Taken seriously, this means the liberated activity of acceptance being realized in detail. This wisdom of our nature might be one of the hardest things for a human being to know thoroughly and yet it is so accessible to everyone, it can’t come from outside of ourselves one bit, and no one can do it for us. When life comes, it is just life – when death comes, it is just death. If we look at ourselves, can we really say this?
Various formulations categorizing stages in practice-realization have been created by generations of people putting Buddhist teachings into practice, some examples are; the Ten Stages of Bodhisattvahood, the Five Ranks, Ten Oxherding Pictures, the progression of four (or eight) dhjana’s and numerous samadhi’s. These teachings and practices can be helpful to be aware of at times. For one thing, simply put, these descriptions illumine some of the many places where we can get stuck and stagnate in the complexities of ourselves. They are like a clear mirror held up to us, reflecting in detail the moving dynamics of our nature. Similarly, these teachings keep saying – don’t stop here, don’t stop there, don’t stop anywhere, so – just practice. As ever, there is the potential to misunderstand and mislead yourself with such definitions as these teachings contain, for as soon as you mistake words for practice, you will perceive practice as something separate from yourself. Another problem with the concepts of stages is that they may encourage you to believe that you can meaningfully assess where you are while you are busily climbing up, or falling down, a stairway to heaven of some sort. But if you were to just look directly for a moment, you wouldn’t be able to find any steps have ever supported or impeded your imagined progress.
Zazen, seated meditation, is this direct looking and seeing, it utterly undermines any delusive ideas of progress while manifesting what is there from the first, the nature of awakening. Zazen is not concerned with stages at all, while it also includes all that the definitions of stages are pointing to – and this is not a contradiction. There is transformation in zazen, the immediate transformation of the self. Even though there is no gain in zazen practice, it cannot be a blank switching off or a ‘time out’ . Because there’s no gain, transformation is not a contradiction to manifesting what is there from the first. Transformation is not growth in the sense that it is commonly misunderstood, irrepressible true nature simply doesn’t increase or decrease.
The immediate liberation of zazen is easy to miss, even though it is vivid, it is also subtle and not insistent. There are many reasons why we might miss the immediacy of unbounded life, the intimate currents of the rivers of our habitual being will likely impel us outwards and away from it and because of these, when we aim at just sitting and just living, it is easy to stagnate in a fog of undifferentiated dissociation, get caught up impulsive distraction, doubts, and many other complexities of obstruction and it can be difficult, to say the least, to see that we are simply doing this to ourselves. Ongoing intimate practice includes and liberates all of this and more, as it illuminates the phases of letting go of the illusory self. There is essentially nothing to be confused about, what we are is vitally liberated from the first. Teachings can help us to see this, practice is what makes teachings meaningful.
If you are interested in further study of one of the examples given above, my teacher, Daishin Morgan, in his book, Buddha Recognizes Buddha*, wrote a short chapter commentary on the teaching poem, The Most Excellent Mirror – Samadhi. In this, Daishin writes a concise summary of the meaning of Zen Master Tozan Ryokai’s Five Ranks (or Five Positions), which is a central element of this poem.
*Available from the Throssel Hole Buddhist Abbey bookshop (purchase paperback and free audio download): https://throssel.org.uk/category/bookshop/