Opening the Hand of Thought

Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice

Kosho Uchiyama, Tom Wright, Jisho Warner, Shohaku Okumura, Tom Wright, Jisho Warner, Shohaku Okumura

• Publisher: Wisdom Publications
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780861713578
• eBook ISBN: 9780861719778
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

For over thirty years, Opening the Hand of Thought has offered an introduction to Zen Buddhism and meditation unmatched in clarity and power. This is the revised edition of Kosho Uchiyama's singularly incisive classic. This new edition contains even more useful material: new prefaces, an index, and extended endnotes, in addition to a revised glossary. As Jisho Warner writes in her preface, Opening the Hand of Thought "goes directly to the heart of Zen practice... showing how Zen Buddhism can be a deep and life-sustaining activity." She goes on to say, "Uchiyama looks at what a person is, what a self is, how to develop a true self not separate from all things, one that can settle in peace in the midst of life."By turns humorous, philosophical, and personal, Opening the Hand of Thought is above all a great book for the Buddhist practitioner. It's a perfect follow-up for the reader who has read Zen Meditation in Plain English and is especially useful for those who have not yet encountered a Zen teacher.

ONE

Practice and Persimmons

How Does a Persimmon Become Sweet?

The persimmon is a strange fruit. If you eat it before it is fully ripe, it tastes just awful. Its astringency makes your mouth pucker up. Actually, you can’t eat it unripe; if you tried, you would just have to spit it out and throw the whole thing away. Buddhist practice is like this too: if you don’t let it really ripen, it cannot nourish your life. That is why I hope that people will begin to practice and then continue until their practice is really ripe.

The persimmon has another characteristic that is very interesting, but to understand it, you have to know something about the Oriental persimmon. There are two types of persimmon trees, the sweet persimmon—amagaki in Japanese—and the bitter, mouth-puckering persimmon, called shibugaki. When you plant seeds from a sweet persimmon tree, all the saplings come up as astringent persimmon trees. Now, if I said that if you planted seeds from a sweet persimmon, all the saplings would become sweet persimmon trees, anyone could understand, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. Without exception, all the saplings planted from sweet persimmon seeds are bitter. If you want to grow a sweet persimmon tree, what do you do? Well, first you have to cut a branch from a sweet persimmon tree, and then you graft it onto an astringent persimmon trunk. In time, the branch will bear sweet fruit.

I used to wonder how that first sweet persimmon tree came about. If the saplings from the seeds from a sweet persimmon all come up astringent, where did that first sweet persimmon come from? One day I had the opportunity to ask a botanist who specializes in fruit trees, and he told me this: First of all, the Oriental persimmon is an indigenous Japanese fruit; it goes back thousands of years. It takes many years to grow a sweet persimmon: even the fruit of a tree forty or fifty years old will be astringent. That means we’re talking about a tree that’s at least one hundred years old. Around that time, the first sweet branches on an astringent tree begin to ripen. Those branches are then cut off the tree and are grafted onto a younger astringent one. What took over one hundred years to grow on one tree is then transferred to another one to continue there.

In a way, Buddhism and our own lives are just like that. If you leave humanity as it is, it has an astringent quality no matter what country or what part of the world you look at. It just so happened, however, that several thousand years ago in India, in the culture of that day, a sweet persimmon was born; that was Buddhism. Or, more precisely, it was Shakyamuni Buddha who was born—like a branch on an astringent persimmon tree that after many, many years had finally borne sweet fruit. After a time, a branch was cut off that Indian tree and grafted onto the astringent rootstock that was the Chinese people of those days. From there, a branch bearing sweet fruit was brought to Japan and planted in that barbaric country. More recently, branches of those Asian trees have been grafted onto trees native to American soil.

Now, one thing about big old trees is that they wither easily. For the most part, there is not much Buddhism left in Asia today, except for Southeast Asia and some places in Central Asia, like Tibet. Japan is one of the few places you can find it, as withered and dried up as it may be. Now the sweet persimmon is being nurtured in America, and it needs to be tended and cultivated so it can flower and ripen here. It doesn’t happen without care and attention.

What I am saying also applies to your individual life. I would like for as many of you as possible to become sweet persimmon branches bearing the sweet fruit of a compassionate life, finding a true way to live as you settle on your astringent roots that are, after all, your own life, and your family, coworkers, and society.

I have had only one concern in my life: helping to discover and mark a true way of life for humanity. That is why I became a monk. Over the years I’ve never wished to become famous by the usual standards of fame. The only thing that matters to me is just to be an example of a true way of life that is possible for anyone anywhere in the world.

The Significance of Buddhist Practice

The starting point for Buddhist practice is how a person chooses to live out his or her life. Please don’t misunderstand me when I use the words Buddhist practice or Buddhism. I’m not talking about some established religious organization. I’m concerned with how a person, any person, who is completely naked of any religious or philosophical clothes, can live out their life fruitfully.

Probably the vast majority of the four billion people in the world today live only in terms of pursuing material happiness. In thinking about their lives, most people devote almost all their energies to the pursuit of material happiness, or health, or prosperity. In contrast to that is the way of life in which we look to some Absolute to be the authority for our life, depending on a god or some idea to validate our way of life. A third approach is to search for some sort of permanent philosophical Truth—but so often what we find is something that has little or no connection to ourselves as individuals.

Now, in terms of these three ways of life, where does Buddhism fit in? Actually, it doesn’t fit into any of them. To explain why, I’d like to return briefly to the story of my own youth. When I was in middle school, I never gave a thought to pursuing happiness materialistically; that always seemed meaningless to me. And the second lifestyle, that of setting up and obeying some sort of Supreme Authority, never appealed to me either. I could never get myself to believe in a great being and just follow along. That left the third alternative, searching after Truth. When I studied Western philosophy in college and graduate school, searching for a great truth, what struck me about this search was the way in which it was undertaken. The tradition of pursuing philosophical truth down through the Greek and German traditions required an extraordinary kind of passion. This kind of passion had no connection to your daily life, which had no value whatever with regard to Truth. It was supposed to be enough just to discover an abstract truth, but the daily reality of living that existed apart from and in contrast to philosophical truth continued to be a problem for me. So finally, although I learned a great deal from it, I could never get myself to throw my whole life into a philosophical pursuit of truth.

Pursuing truth was certainly the backdrop for the kind of life I wanted to live, but not truth in the sense of some sort of absolute, divorced from reality. In other words, when we talk about some ideal truth, or the way something should be in its ideal state, we can’t help but feel a contradiction between that and the reality of what we are. My departure point was to move to the very edge of this contradiction and from there to find a truth that was undeniably real.

In the New Testament, Paul talks about the struggle between the form of what ought to be and the longing or voice of one’s own body.³ That is one area in which I always felt a connection with Christianity. Although I never came to believe in God in the Christian sense, I did feel strongly Paul’s words concerning this struggle between body and spirit.

At that time in my life, I really didn’t have a deep enough understanding to come out with a clear definition of truth in the philosophical sense. I didn’t know what it was, but I was convinced that it was by truth or in truth that I wanted to live out my life. Gradually, a feeling grew inside me that the way I was searching for was very close to that talked about in the Buddhist teachings, and so I began to look more deeply into the Buddha Way. Finally, I became a monk. It is only after forty years of Buddhist practice that I finally feel I can begin to give a clear definition of truth.

The Four Seals

To begin with, there are two kinds of reality within our lives as human beings. One is the reality of chance or accident. The other is a reality having an absolute or undeniable nature. For example, perhaps I pour myself a cup of tea. I don’t have to be pouring tea for myself, it’s an accidental reality. There is no absolute reason why I have to be sitting here having tea, I just happen to be doing so. Seeing things in that way, most of our life consists of accidental realities: things could be taking place another way.

This is not to say there are no absolute realities. There are indeed some undeniable realities. For example, all living things die. There are no exceptions! No matter how much one is opposed to it or resists it, everything dies. This is an inescapable reality. So, unlike the accidental realities that just happen to come about, that could be changed by intention or design, there are undeniable realities that occur no matter how much we may resist them.

Any real or absolute truth must consist of living out our lives in accord with the inescapable realities that come about no matter how much we may oppose them. Buddhism as a religious teaching is founded precisely upon this kind of truth. During the period when trade between India and Greece and Rome was flourishing, around the time of Christ, when Mahayana Buddhism was developing, expressions and explanations concerning Shakyamuni’s attitude and way of life became highly refined. Then, out of this, the true uniqueness of Buddhism developed. This uniqueness is embodied in the four seals, or principles, the shihōin (sometimes only the first three seals are mentioned, in which case they’re known as the sanbōin). These four seals more or less summarize Buddhism.⁴

The first seal is that all phenomena are impermanent, shogyō mujō. The second is that everything is suffering, sangai kaiku. The third is shohō muga, sometimes glossed as all things and events (all dharmas) being without self. Maybe it would be clearer to say that things have no substantial independent existence of their own. The fourth seal is that nirvana is tranquillity, or quiescence, nehan jakujō. In Mahayana Buddhism, the expression shohō jissō—all things are themselves ultimate reality, or all things are as they are—is also used for this point, meaning that everything is truth in itself. These four succinct principles are unique to Buddhism.

Impermanence, shogyō mujō, means that every living thing dies. In other words, everything that has life loses life. Moreover, no one, least of all the living thing itself, knows exactly when its life will end. Life has a limit, and it is always in a state of uncertainty. This is the first undeniable reality.

I have mentioned that many people think that simply pursuing material happiness or riches is most important in life. But stand that way of life next to the reality of death and it completely falls apart. When a person who thinks he is happy because of his material situation has to face death, he’s likely to fall into the depths of bitterness and despair. If happiness means having plenty of money and good health, then by that very definition, you’re only going to hit rock bottom when it’s your time to die. When you are faced with death, what good is being healthy or wealthy? That is why all of these materialistic pursuits only end in despair in the face of the undeniable reality of death.

What exactly is it that we have to learn from this first undeniable reality? We have to clarify what life and death really are. We have to know clearly just what it means to be alive and what it means to die. In Pure Land Buddhism, there is an expression goshō o negau; that is, have hope for the next life. The belief is that life opens up after death. But that’s not a very good understanding of the expression. What goshō, or “afterlife,” refers to is the life that arises when one clarifies this matter of death. It means knowing clearly just what death is, and then really living out one’s life. That is the most important thing we can learn from the first undeniable reality.

For us to remain unclear about life and death can only result in our dying in great despair and bitterness. This point leads to the second undeniable reality, that all things are suffering, or sangai kaiku. Suffering is not something that comes to attack me periodically; my whole life, as it is, is suffering. Nevertheless, I go around fighting with people, loving them, ignoring them, without ever being able to truly see that suffering. Actually, suffering in the deepest sense is all of that. In other words, as long as this matter of death remains unclear, everything in the world suffers. That is the meaning of the idea that all sentient beings are suffering. It is something that isn’t talked about much simply because most people wouldn’t have any idea of what it’s about.⁵

I’ve mentioned that there are two types of realities, the one being accidental reality and the other being undeniable reality. When you think about it, I myself am just an accidental reality. After all, there is nothing that says I had to be born in twentieth-century Japan. I could just as well have been born in ancient Egypt, or Papua New Guinea, or indeed not have been born at all. In other words, being born in any age or in any place is a possibility, an accident, just as my being here right now is an accident.

From that we can say, then, that all the things I see in my world, and the world itself taking shape as I create it, are also an accident.⁶ For example, perhaps I look out the window and see that the weather has cleared up, so I think about what a nice day it is. But that is only because of where I happen to be. Somewhere else, it is surely raining right now. So, in a broader sense, it isn’t quite right to say that “today” is a clear day. After all, somewhere there are people who are getting rained on or snowed on, and somewhere else, people must be laboring under a hot desert sun. Therefore, there’s no reason to believe that only the things I see with my own eyes are absolutely or undeniably true.

There is no way we can say that our way of looking at things is absolute. If you and I are sitting together, you may think that we are both looking at the same cup in front of us, but it’s not true. You look at it from your angle and from your perspective and I view it from mine. There’s no ground for our saying that a fact we know or an idea we embrace is absolute.

Consider all the weather satellites circling the Earth. From their positions, the whole world looks like a map, and cities like New York or Tokyo look like some sort of mold growing on the surface. So it looks like people are just living in the same sort of mold that grows on a piece of old cheese. In that sense, I have no ground for saying that the world I see is everything; even weather satellites can show me that. If we look at a picture taken from the moon, the earth appears to be nothing more than a little ball with some sort of white fuzz floating around it. In brief, everything I happen to see is an accident.

Since my having been born in Japan in the twentieth century is just an accident, it follows that I—sitting here and looking out the window in this room of this particular house, at the moment when I write these words—am nothing but an accident. I’m only relative, I’m not absolute. If I come to the conclusion that I am accidental, then naturally my thoughts are also accidental.

If both my mind and I are accidental, maybe the only thing remaining that could be called inevitable, or absolute, is God. That God must be absolute is the foundation for the rise of religions where only God can be true or real. Since we are nothing but things that have been created, we are just relative. The origin of this kind of religion thus begins with denial of oneself in favor of another, God.

The third way to approach life that I mentioned earlier says that because from an individual perspective everything is relative, or accidental, what should be relied on is abstract truth, or logos. This kind of truth is derived purely from human reason, or, in Greek, nous. This is the foundation of Western philosophy.

This kind of thought doesn’t focus on the individual, but rather upon the whole of humanity. Though every member of humanity was born and dies, humanity as a whole doesn’t die. Well, actually it will eventually—with the end of the Earth or before. But humanity has been around for over fifty thousand years and will probably be around for another fifty thousand. In other words, it wasn’t born, in a certain sense, and won’t die. The academic world does not take up the problem of things coming into being and dying. Rather, what it takes up is humankind as a phenomenon that was not born and won’t die. However, to view things from that perspective entails coming to the realization that when I die I will be abandoned by truth.

How does Mahayana thought differ from these ways of looking at things? The Buddhist approach from a Mahayana perspective might be described this way: By accepting and properly understanding the true nature of both accidental and undeniable realities, and by living in accord with this understanding, the matter of living and dying will cease to be such a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Prefaces
• 1. Practice and Persimmons
• 2. The Meaning of Zazen
• 3. The Reality of Zazen
• 4. The World of Intensive Practice
• 5. Zazen and the True Self
• 6. The World of Self Unfolds
• 7. Living Wide Awake
• 8. The Wayseeker
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author and Translators
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index
• Copyright