Chapter 93 of Shobogenzo is called “Doshin” or “The Will to Truth.” Can you believe we only have two chapters left to go? What will I do then? Something else. I suppose. According to Nishijima, Doshin is the Japanese equivalent of the sanskrit word Bodhicitta, Wiki pithily describes bodhicitta as “a spontaneous wish to attain enlightenment motivated by great compassion for all sentient beings, accompanied by a falling away of the attachment to the illusion of an inherently existing self.” Dogen focusses more on “the unreliability of the world and the precariousness of human life.” (p.223) Everything changes. We are going to die. “I will be separated from all that is dear to me.” Including “I.”
Big T’s ma had a stroke last week – she lost the use of her left side and managed to get help by pressing her panic button. “It was like magic” she says when we visit her in the hospital “I pressed the button and then there was this voice asking me if I needed any help and not to worry someone would be in shortly, and then my neighbour came in and called the ambulance and here I am.” She tells us how her body malfunctioned and failed on her in a matter-of-fact way and then mixes in her wonder and delight at the way technology helped her out. She struggles out of the hospital bed and mobilises a short distance up and down the ward using a frame. Her left arm won’t do what it’s told but the fingers can wiggle. She says she hoped we would have smuggled a dog into the ward to visit, and we all giggle at the chaos this would have caused. “I should do this more often’ she jokes ” then I’d get to see more of you all…”
Next Dogen considers the importance of the Three Treasures (buddha, dharma, sangha) Dogen writes that when we die there’s a middle existence of seven days and we need to be chanting Buddha/Dharma/Sangha even during this intermediate time between bodies – namu-kie-Butsu, namu-kie-Ho, namu-kie-So:
“Oh I’m scared of the middle place
Between light and nowhere
I don’t want to be the one
Left in there, left in there…”
We should chant as we leave the middle place and enter the new womb, chant as we’re reborn with new sense-organs. Chant as we go. Chant as we go. Chant as we go. Join in the chant. In this life? Make Buddhas, wear the robe, copy the sutras, receive them in reverence, bow to them, make offerings to them. Sit in zazen.
What to do if you have no belief in rebirth, or a middle place, like me? “When I die in a few years, not so long from now, everything will become nothing including me, and I will take a rest forever.” says Nishijima. That’s one answer. “Rebirth is a myth that some Buddhists believe in. It might be loosely based on fact. But it might just be a fantasy.” is another answer. Yet another way of thinking about this is to see rebirth in the “Eternal Now” that arises in concentrated, meditational states of mind – as Simon Child puts it:
This enhanced sense of Now leads to a lessening of the sense of past and future and ultimately to the merging of all time into a continuous present. This must be experienced for oneself but perhaps these words can convey how time can be felt as a continuous unbroken flow, past and future being extensions of the now just as the centre of a piece of string is not separate from the rest of the string.
When past and future fuse into a continuous Now, there is the sense that all time is present now, just as there is no doubt at all that all space is present now. Even though one is only at one particular point in space one does not doubt that all dimensions of space exist in the now. Time is like another dimension of space. If the now is continuous how could past and future not in some sense already exist? if they were yet to be created, or had already perished there would not be a sense of continuity but a sequence of discrete moments and the possibility of noticing gaps or joins between these moments. Yet in experience the flow is perfect. Dogen talks about this view of time in his famous sermon “Uji”, his essay on Being-Time. At the moment of his Enlightenment the Buddha said “I was, am and shall be, enlightened simultaneously with the Universe”.
.… “We go towards something that is not yet, and we come from something that is no more. We are what we are by what we came from. We have a beginning as we have an end.” writes Paul Tillich…
…Enveloped in dry ice – it’s Winter 1989 – I am at the Brixton Fridge nightclub at a night called Daisy Chain. I am drug and alcohol free. “That’s The Way Love Is” by Ten City is playing and I am lost in it. The lights colour the fog and it turns red, blue and orange: a huge, ever-growing, pulsating brain that rules from the centre of the universe. I know there are other people here dancing, I can feel their presence in the way the air pressure moves and changes, but I can’t see them at all. White-out. I know there were better songs before this one, and better still to come, – but right now every single song, every single piece of music ever made is being heard at the same time. It’s just me in the mist and the music and movement. I am outside my body in the vapour and inside my body in the music. It’s a strawberry and chocolate scented haze – even writing this 26 years later, I can still smell it. Even writing this 26 years later, I can still feel it. This is the Eternal Now. 26 years later whenever I dance to any music, I go back to that 6 minutes and 44 seconds of warped strings, Philly vocals and house percussion. “Music swims back to me.“ Totally on my own, yet totally connected with every living thing… “may they be well, may they be happy.” Strobing waveforms into the universe, breathing in suffering, breathing out the opposite. Sloughing off madness.
Picture Credit – Handyman – Margate Rotor ride in action around 1980. From Urban75 website.
On another dancefloor, another time, I hear Slam by Phuture and the floor falls out from underneath me like The Rotor ride at Margate’s Dreamland – you stick to the wall held by centrifugal force and the ground lowers 6 foot away. Held up by invisible forces. Invisible forces hold it all together: magick. Pendulum by FKA Twigs makes me feel the same way – the Eternal Now. “Music pours over the sense/and in a funny way/music sees more than I/I mean it remembers better;/remembers the first night here.” Strapped into my life, in this private night-club on a hill, the past and the future all arrive and release at the same time. “They both go their separate ways and love is just a memory/But a young heart doesn’t stay sad long….”
Sitting in zazen today, the room turns upside down and the floor falls away. All the moments are here again. Climbing high on the Isle of Skye, Costa Rica cloud forest hikes, live volcano climbing – ground rumbles sub bass trembles, giant turtles laying eggs at midnight, drinking a cup of coffee in Tottenham Court Road Starbucks watching shoals of people swim by, you dare me to jump from the pier in Dubrovnik and I do it; sea anemone spines punctuate my feet with tiny full stop pinpoints, first penetration on poppers crying on the steps of St Martins in the Fields while the Queer Parade goes by lying in the darkened bedroom wondering if I’ll ever get up again, “I dance feelings like they’re spoken” frozen to the bone in Paris Catholic Mass with Irene A – flesh and blood in my mouth, warm rain showers over my body in Soho Square the day after I met Big T, Ana Baptist drips hot wax onto my skin, the first time Big T and I come to Europa – the ringing in our ears and the freshness of the air after East London soup, the stunned, bewildered,look on my father’s face in the car driving home after he’s released from Leicester prison into the unstructured activity and random noise of daily life again, witnessing his overload and trauma:1980-2015 – Chant as we go. Chant as we go. Chant as we go.
