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I’m having cataract surgery in January, near the end of the month. Both eyes, one week apart. I know this is not a complicated procedure, and most everyone my age will undergo that procedure before it’s all said and done. But the thought of having someone poking around my eyes doesn’t give me a lot of joy.
But the cataract surgery itself isn’t the point of tonight’s offering. It’s what the procedure does – removing what veils my ability to see – and how that relates to our Zen practice, that struck me as something worth considering. So, tonight I want to just read a few passages from various sources and invite you to “see” (pun intended) what the notion of removing veils evokes within your Zen and contemplative practicing selves.
We’ll start with the New Testament, which, in all four gospels, recounts instances in which Jesus heals the blind. The physically, phenomenally (and most likely, metaphorically) blind. Here’s part of the telling in the Gospel of Matthew, taken from the English Standard Version of the bible.
Mt 9:27-30
27 And as Jesus passed on from there, two blind men followed him, crying aloud, “Have mercy on us, Son of David.” 28 When he entered the house, the blind men came to him, and Jesus said to them, “Do you believe that I am able to do this?” They said to him, “Yes, Lord.” 29 Then he touched their eyes, saying, “According to your faith be it done to you.” 30 And their eyes were opened.
The spiritual teacher Adyashanti, in his book Resurrecting Jesus (© 2014, 2016. Sounds True, Inc. Boulder, CO), casts the meaning of faith as “trust in things unseen.” That’s a memorable definition, I think. Things unseen can mean different things to different people, some fear-inducing, others safe and hopeful. The point is, of course, that when our vision is veiled, we don’t see clearly; we are, in a sense, blind. And when we reach out in trust, as we do when we practice, it’s just possible that the veils can be removed. Then, clear sight is the result. Cataract surgery!
Blue Cliff Record (Hekiganroku) Case 94 and Book of Serenity (Shoyoroku) Case 88
This one is a bit obscure, to say the least, possibly even to the clear-eyed. Here’s how it reads:
The Surangama Sutra says, “When we don’t see, why can’t we see our not-seeing? If we see our not-seeing, that is, of course, not the true aspect of not-seeing. If we don’t see our not-seeing, then there is naturally not a[n objective] thing. How can it not be yourself?”
“How can it not be yourself?” I think the koan is talking about non-dual experience, of the twins this and that. In the words of the Heart Sutra, “form and emptiness.” My teacher Fr. Greg Mayers used to say of non-dual experience, “It’s like trying to look at your own eyeball without using a mirror.” Just imagine such an act! How is it possible to see your own eyeball (what seems to me to be not-seeing in the koan) unless you look at your reflection in a mirror or some other reflecting object (seeing)? You’ve gone from ultimate, unmistakable not-twoness, or oneness – non-duality – in the essential world (not-seeing) to ordinary, unmistakable duality in the phenomenal world (seeing).
Granted, the wording of this koan is … well, let’s not try to characterize it. Obscure is a doing the wording a kindness, at least for me doing this offering. But the point is clear: the whole notion of a seer and a thing seen is veiled in duality. Cataract surgery is needed to experience clarity.
Norman Fischer, Excerpt from a Talk at Tassajara, November 1997 (See https://everydayzen.org/teachings/seeing-things-as-they-actually-are/.)
It’s nice that so many of us could find the time today to let go of all our concerns and accomplishments and problems, and just sit here together…. I went out for a short walk a little while ago and there was some light rain falling. And I thought that our zazen practice is very much like the rain. Like the rain, it is steady and nourishing and it will soak everything in our lives. It moistens seeds that have been buried inside us for a long time, and when they are moistened these seeds will exert themselves and they will sprout. Although both zazen and rain have the property of being sometimes stormy and troublesome, both are necessary. Rain falls because that is its nature, rain doesn’t need to struggle or question itself, rain never doubts or complains, it simply falls completely, all the way to the end. And our zazen practice is also like this.
When we sit in zazen for a long time we get to see many, many things within the small circle of our awareness. We see breath coming and going, we see thoughts arising and passing away, we see emotions, we see various sensations in the body, we see the workings of sight and sound, touch, taste. As Dogen says, “We see many things, as far as our eye of practice can reach.” But what we can see and sense with the apparatus of our sense organs, and in Buddhism a mind is counted as a sense organ, what we can apprehend with our sense organs is not the whole of what our actual experience is. This is where our human challenge, and human problem comes in, because we human beings are born with a little bit of arrogance. We think that we can see and know ourselves, and that we can see and know our world. Then seeing and knowing our world, as we think, we can evaluate it, and we find it lacking, our world and ourselves. So we feel that we need to, somehow, change our world, or change ourselves, and we suffer for all the desire and lack, for all our craving and confusion.
But all of this is based on a very limited assessment of what our life is. We believe this limited assessment through and through, it’s so ingrained in us, but it just isn’t really so, or I should say, maybe, it’s not only so. The world we see is certainly a real world and a true world, but we simply don’t see it in its full dimension, and we are not able to see it in its full dimension. Our six sense organs can’t reach there. But when we sit with a strong commitment to our sitting practice, with a strong commitment to returning, in a really radical way, just to the present moment, putting everything else aside, by bringing everything else right here, to the present moment, without any gap, without any distance, we can appreciate and have a real feeling for the vastness that is contained within our little circle of awareness. What we see as our thoughts are not only our thoughts, what we see as our emotions are not merely our emotions, what we think of as our seeing and hearing isn’t just some limited seeing and hearing. Everything is here, moment after moment. There are worlds on worlds created and destroyed with each and every breath.
When we appreciate this we won’t be so stuck on our individual problems. We will still have problems, of course, and we will still work with our problems. We’ll still make choices, act on those choices, and live the consequences of them, but we will be able to see all of this in a more full way, and appreciate it more deeply, and therefore relate to it with greater peace and competence.
The point here is our vision can extend past or through the veils that our conditioning (or in the case of cataracts, our age) has cast over our eyes – especially our spiritual eyes. And cataract surgery, in our case our Zen and contemplative practice, can serve to remove those veils and allow us to see clearly and live fully in this world we inhabit.
So, let’s return to our sitting practice now, and relish it, along with our spiritual selves. Let’s trust in the things unseen and let that trust work in us and on us to remove those pesky veils.
Thank you.
EMPTY CLOUD ZEN 