"You create Antaiji, but you don't count for anything"

Before Docho-san left Antai-ji, he left us with a few teachings about his thoughts on life in this monastery.

His philosophy about the monastery is - "You create Antaiji, but you don't count for anything." This is broken up into two parts:

1. You create Antaiji

• This can obviously be viewed as being the same as the old cliche phrase - "life is what you make of it."
• But I think we can also apply a little Buddhist philosophy (Abhidharma). When you study Abhidharma, you learn that there are two kinds of reality - material phenomena (rupa), and mental phenomena (nama). There are four types of absoulte reality - consciousness (citta), mental formations that arise with consciousness (cetasika), material form (rupa), and Nirvana (Nibbana). Abhidharma also tells us that sentient existence consists of 5 aggregates or heaps (khandhas in Pali, or skandhas in Sanskrit) - there is no underlying self or soul aside from these 5 aggregates. These five are - material form (the Rupakkhanda), feeling (the Vedanakkhandha), perception ( the Sannakkhanda), mental formations (Sankharakkhanda), and concsiousness (the Vinnanakkhandha). There is one rupa khanda - the Rupakkhanda; and there are four nama khandas - the other four. Feeling, perceptions, and mental formations are all cetasikas, so the four nama khandas are actually just cetasikas and cittas.
• If we look at material form (the Rupakkhanda), we see that there are 6 sense organs and their objects. Eyes, ear, nose, mouth, body, and mind are the 6 sense organs, and sight (all material objects - or rupa), sounds, smell, tastes, feeling, and thoughts are the 6 objects of perception. The actual Rupakkhanda consists of the 6 sense organs AND the 6 sense objects. This means that the things we look at are part of our form aggregate. Which means that when I look at a person, that person becomes part of my material form aggregate.
• This leads to the conclusion that we create Antai-ji, because all of the things at Antai-ji ACTUALLY ARE our material form aggregate. They are not a separate self. We are not a separate self aside from Antai-ji.

2. You count for nothing

• This also has a two-fold meaning, one conventional and one Abhidharma.

1. Conventional - you are just a little cog in the big picture of Antai-ji. Antai-ji has been here for decades before I arrived, and it will (probably) be here for long after I leave. What I do here does not make that much of a difference in the big picture of things.
2. Abhidharma - as I said before, there is no self aside from the 5 aggregates. So, literally there is no self. We are not individual entities, we just think that we are, so in a way - we 'don't exist.' But of course, that shouldn't be taken literally. We don't exist only from an absoulte point of view. On the conventional level, we are human beings who have emotions, etc.

Docho-san also gave us another talk about why Antai-ji works the way that it does. He discussed how we put a lot of hard work year-round into the rice field, but if we wanted, we could just go begging in Osaka for two weeks and have enough money to buy enough rice for the entire year. This also applies to everthing else at Antai-ji - the potatoes, radishes, cucumbers, etc. However, if we didn't rely on our rice field and gardens, then we wouldn't take them too seriously. We would just think - "Oh, well if I don't plant this rice plant correctly and we have a bad harvest, we can just go to town and buy some food in order to survive." This would allow us to not take our work seriously and essentially daydream while we are working. Since we have to take our work seriously, you have to put 100% of your consciousness into the work that you do. When you plant rice, you can't be thinking about the tempura you'll be eating at lunch, or how you'd like to go drive to the town and hit on the local school girls. You really have to pay attention to everything that you do and make sure that it is done effectively.

Docho-san talks about 'artificial mindfulness,' which my teacher back in LA, Brad Warner, and his master, Nishijima-Roshi, have been harping on recently. There is a trend in Buddhism to put a great emphasis on so-called 'mindfulness.' However, when people put emphasis on being mindful, it is more like they are video-taping themselves being mindful - thinking to yourself "OK, now I am just peeling potatoes." When you do this, you are turning Buddhism into some sort of ideology, not a way of life. When mindfulness turns into thinking about the present moment, it stops being mindfulness. Real mindfulness is just paying attention to all of the details of something. When you are cooking your dinner, you shouldn't let the pot overflow when it starts to boil; you should wash your hands before you start preparing the food, and after any time you touch something dirty. If the pot overflows, or you contaminate your food, then you weren't actually paying attention - it's as simple as that.

Before I came to Antai-ji, I tried to take one thing at a time and focus on doing that 'mindfully.' I said, OK, for now, I will just try to be really mindful when I am taking showers. This worked pretty well, but I would become distracted once again when I was going to work. I would browse internet websites, check my e-mail, etc. At Antai-ji, you are essentially forced to pay attention to all details of your life. If you don't take your shoes off the right way, or if you put a personal item in the wrong place, you are going to be corrected. During sesshin, you can't go back to your room after a bathroom break, you have to use the toilet and go immediately back to the meditation hall. You can't talk during samu. All of these sorts of things create an external enrivonment where it is impossible not to pay attention to all the details of your life. Hopefully, when you leave Antai-ji, these conditions will have permeated into your brain and will be an internal environment that you can apply to everything that you do out in the world of householders. Will I be able to live up to that challenge? I don't know.

The important thing is paying attention to the details. This is the teaching of the Buddha. Most of the original Buddhist meditations are simply paying attention to detail. You just sit down and watch your body, or your mind. If you think about driving to work, you say to yourself 'I am thinking about driving to work. If your leg starts to hurt, you say to yourself - 'my leg hurts' or possibly just 'pain.'

The point to this is to notice how our reality simply consists of the 5 aggregates, which arise due to causes and conditions. The Buddha taught that the 5 aggregates are the world, and the 5 aggregates are suffering. There are no 5 aggregates outside of suffering, and there is no suffering outside of the aggregates. In fact, if you carefully read my brief introduction to Abhidharma, you'll have noticed that the only type of reality aside from the aggregates is Nirvana. The more familiar we become with the 5 aggregates, and their inherent empty self-nature (due to the fact that they only arise because of the presence of particular causes and conditions), we can actually put an end to the aggregates (if we are practicing Nikaya Buddhism). But in Mahayana Buddhism (which Zen belongs to), we only learn the emptiness of the aggregates, we don't actually put them to an end. In fact, we commit ourselves to continually re-appropriate these aggregates throughout many, many lifetimes. The Mahayana path is to learn emptiness, and be able to teach it to others, so that all sentient beings will be freed from suffering (the aggregates).