I’d like to continue our discussion of Suzuki Roshi’s commentaries on the Sandokai, looking today at his fourth talk, “The blue jay will com eright into your heart.” His version reads, “All the objects of the senses/interact and yet do not./Interacting brings involvement./Otherwise each keeps its own place.”
Whereas the version we chant, from the Maezumi lineage goes, “ Each and all, the subjective and objective spheres are related/ and at the same time independent./Related yet working differently, though each keeps its own place.”
Though the style is very different, I think we can see that both are pointing to the nature of what we call “inside” and “outside,” (the subjective and objective) and the problem of separation and the relation of non-separation to differentiation or individuality.
As I’ve talked about before, this problem can go by the name of “intentionality” in Western philosophy and can be another way of wrapping our minds around the notion of non-separation. Sometimes non-separation can be presented as if it’s something only experienced in the midst of kensho, when we have a mystical experience of “oneness.” But in another sense, it’s the way things already are, whether we recognize it or not. And intentionality –or “aboutness” is a way of describing this pre-existent version of non-separation as it applies to our awareness, which is always an awareness of something. And this is thru not just of senses, of perceiving something, but also forms of consciousness like thinking or hoping or believing. Any kind of state or mode of consciousness like that exists only in relation to its object. We don't have hearing without something being heard. There's no sight without something being seen. We can't believe something without the something we believe. Our most basic sense of self and our basic sense of awareness is constituted by this engagement with the world. And how what's particularly relevant to meditators is the idea that we don't start with a separate pure inner awareness that then encounters the objects of the world.
That's the image of the mind we often get, of the mind as mirror. Where the mind is like the clear empty mirror and then one thing or another of the world is reflected on it. Somehow the mirror preexists the objects that are reflected in it and has a existence independent of what is reflected in it. The idea of that clear preexisting mirror can lead us in the pursuit of a kind of empty, pure, and contentless awareness or consciousness as if that is the primordial true self before the objects of experience.
What I think the Sandokai is pointing to is that awareness and engagement and involvement all arise together. My sense of who I am arises through what I see, hear and can do. Out of my perceptions and agency. The “I” is a precipitate of all those engagements. Now, this is the level at which we could say non-separation is the basic pre-existent reality of everything. And yet, it's also a part of our human nature that we're able to separate the world into self and other. Into discreet things and to see each thing as complete and discreet, full in its own right.
In one sense, this is how we talk about the absolute. What do we mean with a word like that? In one sense, it can refer to the completeness of any moment of anything just as it is. It doesn't refer to that pure consciousness of the empty mirror -as if we only encountered the absolute when all thought and feeling and perception stop and we're only in this realm of pure being or not knowing. Rather, we encounter the absolute moment after moment as - "now this, now this, now this." Then each thing, we would say, stands on its own pedestal. Is an absolute expression of itself and existence just by being what it is.
It makes me think of the poem by William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which appeared I believe in 1925 in the book “Spring and All.” And the entire poem goes like this, "So much depends/ upon a red wheelbarrow/ glazed with rainwater/ beside the white chickens."
Those first words, "So much depends upon," are a very curious hook. He's not just giving you a little imagistic portrait of the wheelbarrow and the chickens. He's saying "So much depends upon." What depends upon it? Well, in a certain sense, we could say so much depends on being able to just see the wheelbarrow and the chickens and the rainwater. So much depends upon our ability to just look, to just be present, to not walk by them and just, you know, kick the chickens out of the way, because I'm on my way somewhere important. . In another sense, "So much depends upon," evokes the whole world that he occupies. A pediatrician on his rounds in what's now suburban Rutheford, New Jersey, going house to house where people still had chickens running around in the yard. In a way it evokes a whole time and place. We see both the absolute in this moment and these objects being just what they are, along with the whole interdependent world, relative world, that's evoked by these things. A world that's defined by and can contain such things.
Suzuki has an interesting analogy with the sound of a Bluebird, and he makes this interesting distinction between sound and noise. Noise, we could say, is what happens when there's an intrusive sound that's interrupting us, bothering us, or is not what we want to pay attention to, but is instead impinging on our senses. I'm sitting here in zazen trying to concentrate on mu and that damn bird is going on and on in the yard constantly distracting me. Then the sound of the bird is noise. It's something apart from me that is constantly violating a boundary of separation that I'm trying to maintain. And I think that it makes for a very good metaphor for this kind of experience of separation, where instead of being immersed in the world, we think of the world as a place filled with a lot of objects and events that are always out of our control that we always have to deal with. Things, we can't quite keep track of or understand, right? All this stuff out there. But the alternative, what he calls experiencing it as sound, would be to place the bird, and yourself, and the zendo, and the people around you, all as part of this moment. Who I am and what I'm doing and where I'm doing it and who I'm doing it with, are all part of one thing. And that doesn't have to be some unusual mystical experience, as if Suzuki Roshi is describing some very enlightened state. No, I think it's perfectly ordinary. We're not that way all the time, but I think it's something that everybody experiences some of the time. Where we're just present to what's happening and being present to it, we're part of what's happening. It's like being part of a crowd. You just feel swept up and defined by what's happening. Everybody's cheering for the team. Everybody is rushing for the subway. Sometimes you can feel everybody's in your way and I gotta push my way through and it's the equivalent of noise. Sometimes you're just caught up in it and you're with everybody and everybody's together is doing the same thing. That's his version of sound.
He uses the example sitting in the Zendo and he points to Mel, I assume Mel Weitzman. And says, if you see him and you just think of this one person as a separate individual , it's a very incomplete picture. To see him is to also see who he is and what he's doing there, which is performing a certain role in a community. A role that defines the community. And that to see him is to see the whole of Zen center that he's part of. The way that if you see a thumb, you know there's a hand and an arm, the whole body. Right? To see one piece is to see and understand the whole of which it's a part. Again, there's a way in which all the time we do that sort of thing automatically. When we walk down the street and see a storefront, we naturally assume that there's a whole store inside, that there's a building there. That there are people, it's part of somebody making a living, selling things in part of a city. We don't assume it's a Potemkin village and the storefront is just a two dimensional facade with nothing behind it. We automatically see it as part of a whole. We see it as a storefront, meaning there's a store behind it, there's a shopkeeper in there, there's stuff they're selling. Right? There's a building. Seeing the storefront is like seeing the thumb and knowing that there's a hand there.
This is the everyday version of interdependence, of interpenetration, of non-separation. Automatically, we recognize things are all part of each other. And yet, and yet, that can break down. Into ways that are sometimes actually very useful when we want to focus on one thing and define it apart from everything else. But often other times, we fall out of synch with our life, out of the flow. Then life is just full of interruptions. It's full of problems. And this becomes the dichotomy of problems and koans that we often talk about. When life is full of problems, there are all these separate events or things demanding a solution we're trying to control, manage, get rid of, fix. The world is full of problems. But there are other times when even though nothing at all has changed, it's just our life. It's "now this, now it's that." Now I stubbed my toe. Now I'm getting old. This is just what life is. It's not problems, it's just all what's happening. And we see life as a koan. Not something to solve, but something to see that we're not separate from.
These lines in the Sandokai abstractly depict this constant interplay between separation and non-separation. The inherent independence of everything and the experience of the absolute as things just as they are, just by themselves. Perfect in their each and own moment and the way they can fall out of that into something that's a separate object, becomes a noise, a problem, right? All these things are the possible modes of our being in the world. Taken together, it's just the koan of life, genjokoan, and there is no problem with any of that. But another dimension of that is the division of life into problems and solutions. Sounds and noises. Self and other. On one hand it's natural and beautiful that we see things both as interconnected and separate. It's like two different hands with two different functions. On the other hand, it's something that we can get stuck in one side or the other and then feel imbalance in our lives. The Sandokai in these lines and Suzuki in his comments are trying to show a way of keeping these perspectives in harmony. Each thing having its own place.