PRECEPTS

Commentary by Gendo
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“As to performing the six paramitas and vast numbers of similar practices, or gaining merits as countless as the sands of the Ganges, since you are fundamentally complete in every respect, you should not try to supplement that perfection by such meaningless practices. 
Huang Po
 
Ancient Zen teacher Huang Po, says performing good deeds with intention of becoming a Buddha is a waste of time.   Not that meditation or ‘good deeds’ are the problem.   Rather, it’s about effort.  Who’s trying to do what to whom?  Meditation is paying attention to what is already here.  To notice what our own body and mind, what experience teaches us.  Is all this Zen stuff really necessary?  No!  It’s only because we lose our way, that practice is established.
 
It is, of course, by our senses that we engage the world of our experience.  All experience begins with raw sensory perception, empty of distinctions (form).   Then feeling arises, feeling that leads to a perception, to an intention, and to consciousness of an object and of the “self” that observes it.  That sequence of events,  called  “skandhas”,  describes how wrapt, selfless attention, empty of separate identity, breaks apart and becomes “self” and “other.”
 
The transition from wrapt attention to “I am here” and “it is there,”  is, in most cases, instantaneous.  It’s our human nature to a focus on self and other, from the standpoint of self-interest and self-protection.  But, sooner or later, self protection fails.  Change (shit) happens, and we suffer.
 
Once in while, a powerful moment of wrapt attention lingers, and we say, “It took my breath away;” a moment expansive , joyful, without fear, empty of self- consciousness.  Then the question arises, “How do I  get back there?”
 
But it turns out that “I” can’t get there.  Because, in that moment of selfless absoption,  “I “ wasn’t there!  Something like letting go of “I”  has to happen.  Like trying to remember something, and the harder you try, the further you get from it.  But stop trying, do something else entirely, and all of a sudden, you remember!
 
Like breathing.  Forget it and it just happens.  Breath is poetry for how consciousness works, how the discriminating self arises, and how self disappears in a moment when mind is at peace.
 
Breath has two dimensions, explained in my Zen training as expansion and contraction.  Outbreath is expansion, releasing what was held inside, expanding until it can expand no more.  Then, for a moment, outbreath and inbreath rest together.   Then contraction, in-breath, wakes up, drawing in all of outside, until it can contract no more.  For a moment, it rests together with out-breath. Then expansion wakes again and seeks its home.
 
Inbreath and outbreath constantly function relative to each other, like countless other opposites:  day and night, male and female, life and death to name a few. All are distinct, opposite activities, generalized as expansion and contraction;  and, at the same time, each is constantly changing and together are one whole: you can’t have one without the other. 
 
Between moments of rest, expansion and contraction separate,  one active, the other quietly in the background.  When expansion and contraction separate, space opens up between them.  From this space discriminating consciousness is born, the self is born  that discriminates between expansion and contraction, discriminates one thing from another from the standpoint of its preferences.   
 
When expansion and contraction rest together, they are one unity. Then the space between them disappears, then the consciousness that is self disappears.
 
But of course, inbreath and outbreath, expansion and contraction,  are always one unity, one activity.  You can’t have one without the other.  This is the case when they meet and come to rest together.  It is also the case when they separate, giving rise to the self that disitnguishes one from the other.  One becomes three.  Three becomes one. 
 
We have lived experience of an “I am” self.  Look carefully and we find that ‘self’ is constantly being born and disappearing in moments empty of self.  And, as breath demonstrates, even in moments of discriminating awareness,  inbreath, outbreath and self remain one whole.  Rather than another “I am” project, something to be achieved, precepts are the reminder of who we already are, where this “I am” self comes from in the first place.