Buddha on the Altar
By Sean Weaver
We have a stone Buddha on our altar at home. It was carved from Oamaru stone by my lovely wife, Jo. It is a symbol to remind us of our own ability to sit quietly in pure awareness. We do not worship this Buddha. Indeed on our altar our Buddha holds a mirror as a reminder that Buddha is not some historical deity, but none other than you and me and our capacity to be awake. Our “awakeness” and “awakability” are already here – this is why there is nothing to attain in Zen. But to access our “awakeness”, our true nature, our Buddha nature, we need to practice being awake.
There are three broad categories of being awake that are relevant here. Firstly, there is sleep when we are asleep in our beds. Let’s call this Awake Category One. Then there is being awake and doing the usual things we do during the day when we are not asleep. Let’s call this Awake Category Two. We are in Awake Category Two just now. And then there is Awake Category Three, which in Buddhism is called ‘Buddha’ or the Tathagatha – “the one who is awake”. Here there is no thinking going on but instead we are in a flow of intimate experience, which is simply our experience of our own body stripped of all thoughts and concepts.
Thoughts and concepts always return to the mind. This is because the human brain is designed to secrete thoughts as the adrenal gland secretes adrenaline. But because thoughts and concepts continually arise, we continually need to use techniques to let them fall away from our consciousness during those periods when we wish to practice our Buddha nature. These periods can include sitting meditation, walking, driving, or any activity. But we tend to anchor it in sitting meditation or zazen.
Through time we get more skilled at dwelling in pure experience and can spend longer periods in this kind of wakefulness. We call this samadhi – a stillness of mind from which insight naturally arises. Out of insight compassion unfolds, because our insight includes our personal recognition that we are not separate from any other. Their pain is our pain. Their joy is our joy. This is com-passion – com (together) patti (to suffer). With compassion fueled by insight we become motivated to act to alleviate the causes of suffering, and to cultivate the causes of joy – in ourselves and in others.
The Buddha on the altar is a reminder of our own Buddha nature that we can access by sitting quietly with eyes lowered in an upright and relaxed posture. Other symbols can remind us of this too: a cross, a crescent, a stone. With practice and in time anything at all can function as a reminder of our true nature and an encouragement to practice this true nature right now. Birdsong, blue sky, dropping a glass onto a wooden kitchen floor – smash! The Dharma gates are indeed countless and we vow to awaken to them.
So, there is nothing to figure out here. We do not need to ponder some tantalising new truth or wonder when it is going to come. Enlightenment and great realisation is physiological - not intellectual. Our task then is to dwell in pure awareness and let thinking about anything fall away. Like the trainee pilot we need to clock up our hours in the air: we do our hours on the Zen path by returning to the body, breath, hearing and being awake. We make good use of these cherished mind-training devices we have been lovingly given by our teachers and ancestors all the way back to Shakyamuni and beyond.
Dogen describes this as the practice of enlightenment. We practice enlightenment from the first breath of the first sit we ever do, and again and again and again. When we expect something special this is just thinking returning and building a wall to exclude us from the Zen garden of pure experience. Tear down this wall by discarding all expectations, and drain all thoughts and concepts away by distracting the thinking mind with what we are experiencing right here, right now. Our practice is to continually tear down this wall, by returning relentlessly to our body’s experience of this treasured moment.
© Sean Weaver
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There are three broad categories of being awake that are relevant here. Firstly, there is sleep when we are asleep in our beds. Let’s call this Awake Category One. Then there is being awake and doing the usual things we do during the day when we are not asleep. Let’s call this Awake Category Two. We are in Awake Category Two just now. And then there is Awake Category Three, which in Buddhism is called ‘Buddha’ or the Tathagatha – “the one who is awake”. Here there is no thinking going on but instead we are in a flow of intimate experience, which is simply our experience of our own body stripped of all thoughts and concepts.
Thoughts and concepts always return to the mind. This is because the human brain is designed to secrete thoughts as the adrenal gland secretes adrenaline. But because thoughts and concepts continually arise, we continually need to use techniques to let them fall away from our consciousness during those periods when we wish to practice our Buddha nature. These periods can include sitting meditation, walking, driving, or any activity. But we tend to anchor it in sitting meditation or zazen.
Through time we get more skilled at dwelling in pure experience and can spend longer periods in this kind of wakefulness. We call this samadhi – a stillness of mind from which insight naturally arises. Out of insight compassion unfolds, because our insight includes our personal recognition that we are not separate from any other. Their pain is our pain. Their joy is our joy. This is com-passion – com (together) patti (to suffer). With compassion fueled by insight we become motivated to act to alleviate the causes of suffering, and to cultivate the causes of joy – in ourselves and in others.
The Buddha on the altar is a reminder of our own Buddha nature that we can access by sitting quietly with eyes lowered in an upright and relaxed posture. Other symbols can remind us of this too: a cross, a crescent, a stone. With practice and in time anything at all can function as a reminder of our true nature and an encouragement to practice this true nature right now. Birdsong, blue sky, dropping a glass onto a wooden kitchen floor – smash! The Dharma gates are indeed countless and we vow to awaken to them.
So, there is nothing to figure out here. We do not need to ponder some tantalising new truth or wonder when it is going to come. Enlightenment and great realisation is physiological - not intellectual. Our task then is to dwell in pure awareness and let thinking about anything fall away. Like the trainee pilot we need to clock up our hours in the air: we do our hours on the Zen path by returning to the body, breath, hearing and being awake. We make good use of these cherished mind-training devices we have been lovingly given by our teachers and ancestors all the way back to Shakyamuni and beyond.
Dogen describes this as the practice of enlightenment. We practice enlightenment from the first breath of the first sit we ever do, and again and again and again. When we expect something special this is just thinking returning and building a wall to exclude us from the Zen garden of pure experience. Tear down this wall by discarding all expectations, and drain all thoughts and concepts away by distracting the thinking mind with what we are experiencing right here, right now. Our practice is to continually tear down this wall, by returning relentlessly to our body’s experience of this treasured moment.
© Sean Weaver
Back to Articles List