No opinion!

Zazen 6 h 30

To turn towards the path of awakening is to turn our gaze inwards and shed light on our illusions. Too often we look outside. We are for this team, against the other, we are on the side of this group rather than the other…

Master Dôgen says: ‘You should cut your ties with worldly opinions’, like this is true, that is false, those are right, those are wrong… You should turn your gaze inwards, because your vision depends on your mind. Fear, for example, narrows your vision. Anger distorts reality. Our interests distort reality.

Seeing the world through your ego – that is, through ignorance of the Buddha’s path, through the greed and aversion that result from it – is pointless for leading your life. Because the ego does not exist. The ego is only a reduction, a simplified, shortened representation of reality, the reality of what I really am. You call yourself a seeker of truth when in fact you persist in ignorance. ‘You affirm the existence of the ego when it does not exist. You cling to life when it is unborn, eternal. You should be practising enlightenment, but you have little regard for reality as it is. You are content to chase after illusions.’ Master Dôgen concludes by saying: ‘How then can you avoid making mistakes?’, in other words, making the wrong choices.’

But what exactly is the ego? The ego is the illusion of believing oneself to be separate from other existences. Believing oneself to be a separate, autonomous entity. This illusion of separation leads to a feeling of lack, of dissatisfaction; because we cut ourselves off from the totality of reality, something is missing, hence the desire to appropriate objects from the world. And of course, it doesn’t work: the more we have, the more we want. So we shouldn’t be attached to our limited points of view, our selfish points of view, our greed, our aversion.

To practise zazen is to adopt an attitude of equanimity towards everything that appears to the mind. We don’t entertain thoughts, we don’t follow them, we don’t reject them, we let them appear, manifest and disappear. Since we don’t dwell on our emotions, our thoughts, on what appears to the mind, then the mind opens up to infinity. It is with this open, empty mind – when I say empty, I mean attached to no point of view – it is with this mind that we can see reality as it is. As the poets say: ‘You can only see well with your heart’, in other words with the original mind, without limits, without defilement.

Please listen to this teaching, it concerns us all. When we speak of emptiness in Zen, we are not saying that something is missing from this vast spirit, we are saying that it is empty of all limits, of all rigidity, just as the sky is empty, even if it lets the clouds pass by.

The vast, limpid sky is not hindered by the flight of white clouds.

I remember the first words of my master, Minamizawa Zenji, after the Dharma transmission ceremony: ‘If you say that your master is better than others, you are a warmonger, you are not a Buddhist.’ No opinion is acceptable. Keep your mind free of everything. The ego-free mind is the all-free mind.

Taiun JP Faure, December 2024