Nomon Tim shares commentary on Master Zhiyi's meditation instructions, invoking the breath when we are sitting on the cushion, and when we are navigating the rest of our lives. This is his first talk as part of Samish Island Sesshin 2025.
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Book of Serenity case 3 - Invitation to Patriach of Eastern India
"A rajah of an east Indian country invited the twenty-seventh Buddhist patriarch Prajnatara to a feast. The rajah asked him, "Why don't you read scriptures?" The patriarch said, "This poor wayfarer doesn't dwell in the realms of the body or mind when breathing in, doesn't get involved in myriad circumstances when breathing out-I always reiterate such a scripture, hundreds, thousands, millions of scrolls."
In this commentary Wansong, the compiler of the Book of Serenity koan collection, tells the story of Prajnatara's life and practice. Including a wonderful little story of how he remembered as a boy that in a past life he and his teacher, Punyamitra, practiced together deeply. And so their practice in the lifetime in which this story occurs was destined. Prajnatara's name is a big deal too: the same Prajna we're chanting about and aspiring too all the time - the transcendent wisdom of the Buddhas. tara meaning jewel. Jewel of Wisdom. Interestingly Wansong doesn't mention Prajnatara's other claim to fame: he was Bodhidharma's teacher!
"A rajah of an east Indian country invited the twenty-seventh Buddhist patriarch Prajnatara to a feast. The rajah asked him, "Why don't you read scriptures?" The patriarch said, "This poor wayfarer doesn't dwell in the realms of the body or mind when breathing in, doesn't get involved in myriad circumstances when breathing out-I always reiterate such a scripture, hundreds, thousands, millions of scrolls."
Tiantong, the earlier teacher to collected this set of 100 koans together which Wansong later wove his comments into bringing us the work in it's final form wrote this verse on this story.
A cloud rhino gazes at the moon, its light engulfing radiance;
A wood horse romps in spring, swift and unbridled.
Under the eyebrows, a pair of cold blue eyes;
How can reading scriptures reach the piercing of oxhide?
The clear mind produces vast aeons,
Heroic power smashes the double enclosure.
In the subtle round mouth of the pivot turns the spiritual works.
Hanshan forgot the road by which he came
Shide led him back by the hand.
These poems are deeply encoded and packed with meaning and allusion and I know I'll never know the half of it. Some is lost in translation from Chinese to English too - the very sounds of the original characters and their tones invokes important feelings too apparently. And shapes in the written characters have meaning too! Maybe in a future life I'll learn classical Chinese.
Here's where Wansong helps us again. He comments first on the koan and then he comments on Tiantong's poetic response to the koan. This one is in couplets.
The first couplet, says Wonsong, is about breathing which fits the koan doesn't it?
A cloud rhino gazes at the moon, its light engulfing radiance;
A wood horse romps in spring, swift and unbridled.
"A cloud rhino gazes at the moon, its light engulfing radiance" is from an ancient song and evokes inhaling. That moment of amazement, perhaps, as you look up and notice the moon. Ah! Look at that! The Cloud Rhino was so inspired he grew his horn. In the koan, Prajnatara says, he "doesn't dwell in the realms of body or mind" when breathing in. Inhalation, respiration, inspiration. Not stuck in the usual ideas of who we are. No dwelling there.
And "A wood horse romps in spring, swift and unbridled" evoked exhaling. Imagine that horse making those wonderful horse sighs blhblhblbh the horse is free, romping, unbridled not involved in myriad circumstances.
Inhaling not caught in your self, exhaling not caught in this world.
Or really we should say inhaling not caught in your conception of self, exhaling not caught in your conception of the world.
Which actually adds up to inhaling fully and freely your true self, exhaling fully living in this wondrous and tragic world with freedom and compassion.
And here's the part that got me excited. Wonsong also tells us to study teachings on breathing practices:
The Sanskrit word anapana is translated as breathing out and breathing in. There are six methods involved with this; counting, following, stopping, contemplating, returning, purification. The details are as in the great treatise on cessation and contemplation by the master of Tiantai. Those whose preparation is not sufficient should not fail to be acquainted with this.
The master of Tiantai is the 6th century teacher Zhiyi ("ZeeEE" ). This is challenging name for English speakers - it helps me to visualize the romanization of it. In Pinyin it's Z-h-i-y-i and in the earlier Wade-Giles system is Chih-i. Sounds like "ZeeEE". The Japanese version is a bit easier Chigi but these days we're trying to stay closer to the original names in Chinese. Remember that in large part Chinese culture moved to Japan through written language - Chinese characters - and the Japanese simply had a different way of pronouncing them. Anyway I mention all of that because maybe 20 years ago Norman gave a series of talks on this and I never could quite make out or remember who he was talking about. Took a while to rediscover that which is fine, plenty of other things to study and think about in our vast tradition. So "ZeeEE"
Master Zhiyi is a very important ancestor in the Tendai Buddhist tradition. And remember that our ancestor Dōgen started in that school - ordained on Mount Hiei above Kyoto where several of us got to go last year. So would certainly have been familiar with Master Zhiyi.
Zhiyi is mostly famous for dense and powerful, and long, treatsies on the Lotus Sutra and he was also one of the great synthetizers of Buddhism. Periodically great scholar-monks would pull together everything they could get ahold of in the Buddhist tradition and try to make sense of it all. Zhiyi has several of those kinds of works. One was called "Explanation of the Sequential Dharma Gates of Dhyāna Pāramitā " for example.
But the cool thing is Zhiyi was also a deep hands-on practitioner too. He felt that both deep experiential practice and deep study were both needed. In one of this works he wrote:
Understanding purifies practice, and practice promotes understanding. Illuminating and enriching, guiding and penetrating, they reciprocally beautify and embellish one another. They are like the two hands of a single body, which, working together, keep it clean.
And it is not just a matter of learning enough to clear away impediments and overcome obstacles in order to advance one’s own enlightenment: one must achieve a thorough comprehension of the sutras and treatises so that you can reveal to yourself, and to others, what they have not heard before.
And so Zhiyi also wrote comprehensive manuals on meditation.
This is oddly rare in our tradition which says it's all about "just sitting" - how do you do just sitting? We have a short text or two from Dōgen, we'll chant the main one tomorrow morning actually, which he based a similarly short text written a century or two before him, but other than that: not much in the Zen literature.
One assumes the meditation instruction mostly happened one on one in the dokusan room. But the Zen canon, while outwardly critical of "words and phrases" never being quite "it" does include many thousands and thousands of scrolls of commentaries on sutras and so on, but so very little on how to actually do Zen practice.
And here in this famous Zen koans case our venerable Sōtō ancestor Wansong - he was actually contemporary with Dōgen, born just 40 years earlier - urges us to learn Zhiyi's teachings on meditation by studying his two meditation manuals. Perhaps this is an acknowlegement on his part. "Folks, we don't have much in our own lineage so let's look to our Tendai cousins." And quite possibly Chinese Buddhism was never as sectarian than the way we tend to think anyway.
So Zhiyi describes 6 gates of practice - 6 ways to orient yourself in zazen and also beyond the cushion. I'll only have time to dip into this briefly and encourage us to renew our acquaintence with the first gate today, but I hope to dealve much more deeply into this going forward. Sometimes we do get a little enchanted with all of the cool stuff in our tradition: teachings, sutras, ancestors - so many treasures - that may our attention drifts a little bit away from grounded moment by moment practice. From deeply deeply committing to the exploration of just this on the cusion. And off the cushion.
When I first started Zen practice I was told - I can't remember by whom, maybe the person who gave me an orientation at Santa Cruz center in 1985? - and I think I heard it all again at Green Gulch a few years later - I was told to count my breath. To sit down, pay a little attention to alignment and posture, drop my awareness into my hara, feel my breath and start adding a number to each exhalation. 1, 2, 3. Feeling the inhales come in for sure - but deeply engaging with the exhales - right there - 4, 5. Should I ever make it to 10, go back to 1. That was it. That's zazen as it was describe dot me. And of course losing track of the count tells you something. You're not counting anymore and you probably not so aware of your breathing. So back to 1.
When I teach this practice now I often says it's better to think of it as "returning to one practice" than "counting to ten practice."
And I didn't know of any other practices. I didn't know about loving kindness practice, or tonglen, or other ways of following the breath, or not following the breath at all and anchoring on some other experience. Or just sitting in some kind of open awareness not trying to do anything at all. All I knew was breath counting so I set to work on that.
I don't remember being particularly critical of this. It was what I was told you did in zazen and I was really interested, it seems, in doing Zen and zazen was main practice so: okay. 1.... 2....
But it does seem a little odd doesn't it? It seems like maybe something a teacher in the 1970's thought of when they noticed everyone's minds were wandering all the time. Maybe this would help. Nice and simple, kind of mechanical, not too exciting, pretty clear. A perparatory practice for something grander later. Maybe something to do with those koan stories I'd read about but, oddly, weren't being talked about particularly at the Zen centers I started going to.
Eventually I felt kinda half-way good at it. Some modest percentage of the time I'd be pretty settled and able to cycle through to 10 consistently for at least a time - who knows how long in the timeless space of zazen. Sometimes this felt pretty peaceful other times it felt like I was kind of just going through the motions. 1, 2, 3, 4, hmm: is this really all there is to zazen?
I was at Tassaraja Monastery as a new student and Zenkei Blanche Hartman was there as a recently promoted Abbot teaching her first practice period, so I went to dokusan to ask her if there was something new I could be doing. Which means it took me about 5 years before I even thought of asking if there was anything else to zazen than counting.
She kind of peered at me and said, yeah I know what you mean, we can start counting kind of automatically because we have counting from 1 to 10 so ingrained in us from childhood. So try this: count down from 10 to 1 instead. End of discussion.
So I did that for a few more years. And yes, after that Norman and other teachers started suggesting other ways of practicing and the knowledge of a huge array of different practices was more an more available. Later I got into the whole modern mindfulness world where's there's this big menu like at a Chinese restaurant - a ton of practice choices and there's danger I think of skipping around too much! The opposite of where I started.
And: it turns out that Breath Counting is Master Zhiyi's first dharma gate speaking to us from the 1,500 years ago. It wasn't made up in the 1970's after all. Breath counting as the first and foremost practice to get started, to return to, to feel how breath counting is non-different from the five other main practices he described. That breath counting goes very deep and is very meaningful and important.
He writes in his "The Six Dharma Gates to the Sublime":
"First, counting as a gate to the sublime. Through relying on counting the breaths, the practioner gains the ability to manifest the four dhyanas, the four immeasurable minds, and the four formless absorptions."
This dhyana / immeasurable mind / absorption language refers to earlier Buddhist teachings on there being 8 progressive states of deep deep concentration. More language stuff that can throw you off: in Pali those concentration states are called jhanas - Romanized with a "j". j-h-a-n-a. Your Vipassana buddies probably call them the 8 jhanas. In the Sanskrit based traditions the words is "dhyana" - starting with a "d." And the character the Chinese chose to translate that word is the same character used by our school: Chan in Chinese voicing, Zen in the Japanese. So we are literally the jhana school and here an ancient master is telling us that breath counting gives us the ability to manifest jhana, dhanya, Zen itself.
We mostly don't get too excited about what our school dismisses as "steps and stages" and I think that's wise. This isn't a project to attain the best meditation states and tell your friends at the end of the retreat: how was your retreat? I did pretty well - I hung out for a while in the 3rd jhana of equanmity with deep settled joy in the body. Think how hard it would be if you friend say, oh that's pretty good but I attained the 4th jhana of beyond desire for pleasure or aversion to pain which brings about complete purity of equanimity and mindfulness.
But it's also a mistake to dismiss all of this. Remember Zhiyi urging us that practice and study together bring us to new horizons and understandings beyond what we could have known before? We hear "just sit" and I think we need to be a bit careful how we hear that. How do you think about your zazen practice? And when the bell rings how to you continue that practice?
Suzuki Roshi taught breath counting too - this in Not Always So:
"You may think it is silly to count your breath from one to ten, losing track of the count and starting over. If you use a computer, there will not be any mistake. But the underlying spirit is quite important. While we are counting each number, we find that our life is limitlessly deep… To count each breath is to breathe with our whole mind and body. We count each number with the power of the whole universe. So when you really experience counting your breath, you will have deep gratitude… You will not be so interested in something just because it is considered great, or uninterested in something usually considered to be small."
In the wonderful biography of Suzuki Roshi, Crooked Cucumber, David Chadwick recounts a challenging experience Suzuki Roshi had which inspired him to return to breath counting.
[Crooked Cucumber p. 335-337]
In a kind of companion volume to his Six Dharma Gates to the Sublime on "The Essentials for Practicing" meditation, Zhiyi talks about how to course corrent in your practice when things get too dull - which he calls sinking - or too spacey - which he calls floating. Sinking and floating - we can all relate to that! Where have you been this morning? More sinking or more floating? Or somewhere else entirely?
The response to floating he recommends will be very familiar to us:
What are the indicators of "floating?" If while one is sitting, the mind prefers to drift off and move about, and the body too is ill at ease....It is appropriate at such a time to stabilize the mind by directing it downwards and anchoring it at the navel, thus controlling chaotic thinking. The mind then immediately abides in stability...[then]..it is easy to establish the mind in stillness.
Just was I was told at the start: drop into the hara. Feel the belly. And emphasize the exhale. Prajnatara's "don't get involved in myriad circumstances when breathing out" let go of all of those thoughts and visions and vaguenesses - even the inspiring cool ones (they are included in floating). Woosh. Grounded. Centered. Releasing.
But Zhiyi says to be more responsive to our current state than always doing it that way. What if you're sluggish, half-asleep, in some kind of aversive mood or mind-state. SInking into the mud. And not even kinda feeling like a lotus?
Then he says to move your energy up:
What constitutes..."sinking"? If when one is sitting, one's mental state is murky and dim, if one doesn't remember anything, or if one's head tends to droop downward, these all constitute marks of "sinking.." At such a time, one should anchor one's mindfulness at the tip of the nose and compel one's mind to abide in the midst of...conditions so that there will be no breaking up and scattering of the mental focus.
Sit up, sharpen up, bring your awareness up the the nostrils. And this is associated more strongly with the inhale. The breathe and enegy of our living flowing smoothly into us. The miracle of our aliveness is here. And not just our personal aliveness. Beyond the self. Aliveness itself. This is awakening - not as something you do but as just how it is. We practice through our bodies - and isn't this ancient text wonderfully specific to the body too, not all heady and abstract - you're head tend to droop downwards when your sinking.
Prajnatara's koan code for this is "I don't dwell in the realms of the body or mind when breathing in" which I think we can take to mean that this is fully realized through body and mind but we don't stop there. The inhale is the whole universe flowing through, it's beyond the conceptions like body and mind.
As usual my introductions and personal asides are so long that I don't have time to give you lots more information about this wonderful teaching on the six gates of meditation practice from master Zhiyi 1500 years ago.
But actually I think that's good. I am doing to be bold here and suggest that we all return to breath counting. If you never took it up now's the time. If it's pretty far in the rear view why don't you bring it back.
If it feels sort of stale and mechanical see if you can engage with breath counting in a lighter and lighter and lighter way. The sense of a number "one" just the lightest of touches on the rich experience of "not involved in myriad circumstances when breathing out". 1000% right here and not caught. Not "involved" in that way of trying to get something or do something or improve something. A celebration of freedom and release.
And fully present for the inhale too. The breath counting instructions don't say much about the inhale. But don't take that as a little time out before the next exhale. Fully present for the miracle of aliveness as expressed by your own uniqueness. And how weird it is that we're so deadly dully familiar with our uniqueness that we forget how wondrous and unique we each are. The inhale is releasing from all of that. That's what Prajanatara means I think by "not dwelling in the realms of the body or mind when breathing in."
You aren't breathing. Breath is breathing. The universe is breathing.
Talking about Blanche Hartman the other night I was reminded of her famous Suzuki Roshi story. If I'm reading the timeline right she caught to practice with Suzuki Roshi in San Francisco for maybe a year before he got sick. By then just a couple of years into her Zen practice she started to feel a little more settled and comfortable. Probably she too was practicing breath counting but I don't remember if she said that, but she was really happy about her progress. I can do this! So she went to share with Suzuki Roshi expecting maybe a little praise or acknowlegement, maybe a new practice to do even, I don't know. She didn't get that. She'd barely gotten the words out when his energy LEAPT up and he said to her very sternly, "you don't do zazen! Only zazen does zazen!" ding-a-ling-a-ling he rang the bell to end the interview.
That stuck with her.
But to avoid being a total jerk a few words about master Zhiyi's second dharma gate: following.
"As for the cultivation of following, one relinquishes the previous dharma of counting. One then relies single-mindedly on following the coming in and going out of the breath. One focused the mind, taking the breath as an object. One becomes aware of the coming in and going out of the breath. The mind abides in the conditions associated with breath [meaning feeling everything in the breath experience very precisely], remaining free of any distraction of scattering of one's point of attention. "
And he gives a few more details about following which we may recognize from the early Buddist suttas:
"...as the mind becomes fine and subtle, it becomes peaceful, still, and free of disorderliness. One becomes aware of the breath, as now long, as now short, as now pervading the body, as now coming in, and as now going out. The mind and the breath carry on in a state of mutual interdependence. The deliberations of the mind become tranquil and settled in a state of stillness."
Later on he says that, of course, everything he tells us about any one dharma gate also applies to all of the other dharma gates. So along with counting for sure you are interested in the mind becoming fine and subtle, peaceful and free too. Just different cognitive framing but it's all one suchness right? As Hannah shared with us so beautifully last night.
The last thing I want to say is remember the incredible opportunity of continuous practice as sesshin! It's just a conventional designation to say that zazen starts at this time, ding ding ding, and end at that time, ding. Zazen never ends and if it never ends how could it start? Zhiyi talks about this too. Zazen is a kind of optimized situation for establishing concentration but don't thumb your nose at the real possibilities here at sesshin - and in your so-called everyday life - for continously practicing the way with not distinctions between activities, between moods, between ideas or concepts. Only practice. Always.
And so in practical terms if you take me up on breath counting count the breath as you walk to the meal, count as we have that nice peaceful long pause before we get to eat. Can you be aware of breath even while eating? While leaving the dining hall. While resting or going on a walk. As you come back here. And then when the bell rights to "start" zazen you realize that as I imagine Thich Nhat Hanh might say that's the bell of continuation. Just marking that something's happening in conventional time so we can stay coordinated but really it's just a sound co-existing with breath. You might end take up the curious practice of noticing when the bell rings if you're on an exhale or an inhale just then. A fun challenge but please don't worry about that. Or anything at all.
Just breathe. Just practice. Just be.
Thank you very much.
