OCEAN OF ESSENTIAL NATURE

The Story of Kabimora

Susan Ji-on Postal

1995 Fall Sesshin at Beaver Farm

Over the last year or so we’ve been looking at our ancestors: the stories of transmission from teacher to disciple that form the basis of the lineage we recite in our service. It will take a few more years to finish, but I already have had much positive feedback from many of you. The recitation in our service is no longer just a gibberishy-sounding list of names, when we have received the stories. Ananda isn’t just a name, he’s the one who memorized everything but didn’t come to realization until after the Buddha had died. Each name is a real story. Although these stories may have mythical or symbolic images, they also have life. They can give us heart,because each one is completely unique. Each one,somehow, tells us something about ourselves. We can understand the intellectually brilliant Ananda who can memorize quickly but doesn’t quite get it. We find ourselves in tune with Shonawashu, whose clothes naturally changed. When it was time for him to be a monk, monk’s robes appeared. I wonder if you too resonate with Barishiba, who stayed in his mother’s womb for sixty years because he didn’t dare tell his parents that he loved the Dharma more than he loved them. There are aspects of ourselves in each story.

In our recitation we use the names they used in Japan because that is how I was taught. Of course, in actual fact, these early ancestors were from India, and their names were in Sanskrit. A few American Zen centers use the Indian names through Bodhidharma, then the Chinese names for all the great Chan masters, and finally the Japanese names from Dogen on. That really seems most appropriate, but change is difficult, especially when things have been memorized long ago So in these talks we will use the names we recite,to minimize confusion.

Today we will sit with Case 14, Kabimora Dai-osho. from the Denkoroku, or the Transmission of Light, by Keizan Zenji. Kabimora’s teacher was Anabotei, whose story we looked at several months ago. Anabotei, during his own journey, had great difficulty understanding that the mind that seeks the Buddha in fact is the very mind that he is seeking. Anabotei’s story was about his awakening to the oneness of practice and realization. When he was well established as a teacher the following incident is recorded:

Great play here, great drama. Anabotei finally had someone to talk to. And he asked, "What is your name?" "How many followers do you have?" The man answered "My name is Kabimora and I have 3,000 followers." Anabotei said, ‘How is it when you use all your magical power to produce a display?" Kabimora replied, "To produce a display is a very small thing for me." Anabotei said, "Can you produce the ocean of essential nature?" Kabimora responded,"What do you call the ocean of essential nature? I have no knowledge of it." And there is the turning point of this whole case. Anabotei explained that the ocean of essential nature is his nature and the nature of all things, and that mountains, rivers, earth, insights,mental powers, all appear from that ocean. And Kabimora got it. He took refuge and asked to be ordained. So Anabotei asked 500 of his senior disciples to help with the ordination of 3,000 of Kabimora’s disciples. If you can just imagine the scale, what kind of a huge ceremony this was, so many followers turning their lives over in service to the Buddha-dharma. It is said that Anabotei said:

So today’s story has to do with this ocean, this ocean of our true and essential nature. We talk about true nature using many images, but the one of ocean is perhaps the least flawed. Analogies always have flaws, but the ocean one is a good one. Remember in the original dialogue Anabotei asked Kabimora, "can you produce the ocean of essential nature?" I’d like to look at that magic a bit, before we go further with the ocean. This whole story opens up with this old man who falls to the ground and becomes a golden man and becomes a girl and disappears and becomes thunder and then is a tiny mite under the cushion. What a magical display. And we might say, "well this has nothing to do with me, I can’t do that stuff." I wonder. I wonder if we don’t conjure up our life exactly like that. Sometimes I’m big, sometimes I’m small and no good and I hide under a cushion. What, you’ve never been a mite? I spend a lot a time hiding, feeling very small. Feeling I can’t do this, I’m no good, I hide. I think we all conjure up stuff, maybe not in a way that’s demonstrated in this story, but not so differently either. It’s the conjuring that is interesting here. I think all of us who have been practicing a while have discovered how we conjure our lives. We can say we think our lives, but what is the thinking mind but this capacity to create? And we create all the time! We define ourselves again and again, sometimes big, sometimes small, sometimes dark,sometimes loving. Most of the time we like to produce a nice person and we do that very well. But it is still at the level of this play. What Buddha-dharma is inviting us to do is to begin to live at a different level that isn’t about this conjuring. Even good invention, inventing a "good me" is not all that is possible. It is limited. Developing a positive self image is at that level of making a "good me", a good sense of ourselves. The little engine that puffs, "I think I can..." has its place. But if we are going to call ourselves Zen students, then we need to see that it too is at the level of thought, at the level of thinking and creating our lives. So exactly like Kabimora, can we conjure up the ocean of essential nature? No. We can’t do that. This great magician with 3,000 followers couldn’t do it. Can we sit on our zafu and think "I am going to enter the ocean of great essential nature now?" We can’t conjure that up at all. Sometimes. If we have been listening to enough Dharma Talks over the years and reading a lot we actually may understand that it exists. In a way that is a first step. Then sometimes that understanding begins to touch our heart and we feel something about it. But that is not the same as being it. So I think I need to caution this group on this point. I’ve seen among some of you an appreciation of the teaching of essential nature, but the experience isn’t complete yet. Of course it’s that way; it takes years and years for most of us to get thoroughly wet in this ocean and to begin then to live a life where the ocean, not our conjuring, is the source.

During a weekend like this we have a chance to get our feet wet - no, our whole being wet. Most of the time on the cushion during zazen we are like that window - the wind blows and it pops open, and it bangs shut again. We’ll have a minute when our mind seems to pop open - AHHHH - and then the conjuring mind gets busy and then - bang - shut! And sometimes the opening and closing is really quick, and sometimes everything stays open for a while and then the bell rings. Damn it! You may have the thought, "do I really have to get up for kinhin?" Yes. When the bell rings we get up. In some zen centers people have the option of sitting through kinhin. I think it is more helpful in the long run to just get up when the bell rings. If something important seems to be happening, if your zazen is "doing you" in a deeper more thorough-going way, that process can only continue, in its own time, to do its work. You are not going to lose anything by standing up and walking. If it’s so tenuous that you don’t want to move, then most likely you are trying to "hold on" to your experience, which we all know is impossible anyway!

So, great ocean of dazzling light is our home and the greatest magicians with 3,000 followers cannot create it. This ocean of reality is a mirror without edges. All the waves of things happening are but reflections. If we can see the magic of the transformations that Kabimora was doing before his realization as just waves and reflections, then they’re OK. In studying the stories of our ancestors I have been so moved by Lex Hixon’s new book, Living Buddha Zen. In Lex’s discussion of this case he comments:

Those of you who know Lex a little know that he has studied deeply in many religious traditions, often being criticized for that. Most of us seem to need to enter deeply into one particular path, but for Lex this broad multi-traditional way certainly has born fruit. In this work he seems to be coming from a place that is very real and very clear . As Living Buddha Zen was published I offered these comments:

He is also dying. It looks pretty serious now. It doesn’t really surprise me that a diagnosis of cancer had something to do with what’s revealed here. This often happens. We accumulate deep understanding, and then when we’re up against the wall, it all comes to fruition. Lex closes this case with a verse:

So in this extended 3-day sitting, let your witness of the conjurer be quick and without judgement. Let us all let our focus be on this ocean quality – entering this pale blue mirror samadhi where everything’s just reflected. The waves that come are just reflected and the mirror isn’t troubled by sorrow and it isn’t ecstatic when there is joy. It’s good that is raining at this sesshin about entering the ocean. Tomorrow we hear of Kabimora’s great disciple Nagarjuna, and that story also has to do with a serpent king who lived under the water. So somehow the images of water are with us, soaking us through and through.

references:

1) Transmission of Light, trans. Thomas Cleary, North

Point, San Francisco 1990, pp56-60

2) The Transmission of the Lamp, trans. Sohaku Ogata,

Longwood Academic, N.H. 1990

3) Living Buddha Zen, Lex Hixon, Larson

Publications,N.Y. 1995, pp. 82-84