Naked Awareness

The body is not separate from the mind. The mind is an activity of the body.

The world does not stand out there at a distance from your mind. Your mind arises within the world, within your physical space. And the experience of what we call the world and physical space arises within your mind.

The colors and forms of trees and buildings and faces are as intimate with who you are as is your most private thought. They are more authentically and completely aspects of you who are than your flickering thoughts or even your deepest longing or most looming fear.

Who you are presences as everything and everyone and every thing and every one has the shape of space and is sunya, space-like, in its ungraspability as a thing or object.

When we say "I" or "you" or "fist" or "tree" it can seem as if we are referring to something. But there is nothing there. Although there is nothing there, this "nothing" or "sunya" is not a blank and dead space we might think of when we hear the word "nothing". What is spoken of is the intimacy of hearing, the presencing of sounds, of colors, of the ten directions. It is space with stars and trees and rice grains and warmth and cold.

When we meet ourselves as we truly are and meet the world as it actually is then the absence of our projections and assumptions and frameworks stands forth in the standing forth of a cup.

The nothing of sunya is the absence of dualism between knower and known self and forms, sounds, stones, cloth, grass, and flowers.

We arrive at sunya by exposing ourselves to reality, by attending openly with the whole bodymind and by releasing any structure of attention that is revealed into the expanse of knowing that it arises within.

Ven. Anzan Hoshin Roshi, continuing teisho 2: "Naked Awaresess" in the teisho series "Five fingers, Ten directions: Commentaries on Eihei Dogen Zenji's text 'Jippo'", presented Saturday, April 14, 2001.

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