Sisyphus

[Jundo]

We are Sisyphus.

Some folks think the point of this practice is to get to a place where we can put the stone down for good (perhaps by realizing that the stone is just a dream). Perhaps we might see Sisyphus's (?) pushing that boulder (of ignorance and delusion) as his practice, his striving, to finally be free of the boulder of delusion by reaching (attaining) that place where the boulder will rest at the top of the mountain permanently, his practice accomplished, Sisyphus free once and for all of the burden of delusion and need to practice.

(or if trying to fix the world ... to get to that place where all of the world's problems are solved once and for all, and Planet Earth becomes Candyland or the Garden of Eden)

It may be so for Perfect Buddha. However, so long as Sisyphus is a human being, we know that Sisyphus will likely never reach that stopping place ... perhaps not for countless lives, if ever ... The "Promised Pure Lotus Land" is very far away. I mean ... when we are dead, then we can put the rock down!

What is more, if Sis' gives up his efforts to push the boulder of ignorance up that hill (practice), he will be quickly crushed by ignorance and delusions which will roll over him ... so he cannot and must not stop practicing.

(and in trying to fix the world ... if we completely surrender and quit trying, this world will be a much worse place.)

What is Sisyphus to do? Or not do? A Koany dilemma!

Well, by realizing "Just This" total accomplishment in every step-by-step of effort he thus constantly arrives, is finally free of the boulder, attains that place of rest and ever and always accomplishes what there is to accomplish ... in the very act of constant practice with rocky delusion! "The earth where we stand is the Pure Lotus Land, and this very body the body of Buddha," to quote Hakuin.

What is more, as he keeps pushing that boulder, he actually gets better at it ... learns to handle it better, keep control better ... he loses control and suffers the boulder rolling over him less often (although maybe still sometimes, until he is a 'Perfect Buddha'). The Practice is truly less of a burden!

He finds that he is Buddha pushing Buddha up Buddha, that the very pushing is 'Buddha'.

BUT (AND THIS IS MY MAIN POINT) ... every second, he must keep pushing because, if he stops, he will be run over ... and every second he risks tripping up and being crushed by that boulder! Practice never ends during this life! There is no guaranty ... even if you have been doing a glorious 'smashing' job of pushing that boulder 30 years ... that you will not stumble in the next step and be smashed!

Still, the burden is not just "carrying a burden" ... but is the whole voyage of living life, and the "burdens" are our walking shoes!

And that was Master Dogen's point of Practice is Enlightenment Itself ...

(and in trying to save this world and its sentient beings ... step by step ... we might actually get something done!)

It all ... mountain and stone and rolling and roller ... just Perfect Buddha all along.

By the way ... I rather prefer this image of sisyphus as the rock as the mountain as sisyphus ... each causing and effecting the other in this thing we call "living" and "practice" ...

Gassho, Sisyphus

[Govert]

Re: Sisyphus

That is why I return to my cushion everytime, ... even if I think I have reached the top

Gassho

Ensho

[Onshin]

Re: Sisyphus

Thats why I'm still doing it after 43 years, if I looked for a goal to start with, any such notions dropped away years ago, now I just sit, sometimes the boulder still gets the better of me - but I just start pushing again.

Thanks again for a good teaching, nice to see a classical education coming in useful ocassionally.

Gassho

Joe

[mr.Lou]

He finds that he is Buddha pushing Buddha up Buddha, that the very pushing is 'Buddha'.

I really appreciate this statement. Could we also substitute this phrase 'He finds that he is dukkha pushing dukkha up dukkha, and that the very pushing is dukkha' because this is what I feel like when the boulder rolls over me, like it did a few days ago when I boiled over so fully with anger that I suddenly realized I was dukkha and I immediately went and sat.

[Jundo]

Hi Lou,

Yes, Buddha is Dukkha and Dukkha is Buddha precisely. Anger too.

Nonetheless, one had best see through Dukkha and Anger to be free thereof, finding Buddha.

Gassho, J

[MyoHo]

A great analogy! Thank you Jundo

Jundo, can we say Sis' would 'achieve' something, if he realized pushing the rock is just what he does? That the pushing is ít and it's ok? That the rock defines him, the steep mountain defines him and the pushing defines him. Without these there would be no Sis'. So Sis' is everything and everything in the story is Sis'. The activity and the subjects in the story is a whole, like us and life?

Looking at the picture I'd wish he could have a short rest, and I would get the guy a glass of lemonade. By thinking this I now too am pushing the rock!

Gassho

Enkyo/Peter/ poata peal

[Kyonin]

Pushing the boulder up is the perfect analogy for practice... and life.

We may suffer pushing upwards and get tired of it. We may find little stations where we rest, but if we stay there too long, we won't reach the top.

But then again, the top is far and hidden in the clouds.

Must keep on.

Thank you, Jundo. I haven't had the chance to read this post, but it came in a wonderful time.

Gassho,

Kyonin

[Jiken]

Again this was a great analogy for me as well. Really rang true for me. Something i will read often.

Thanks Jundo

Gassho

Daido

[Nenka]

I confess I have trouble with this sometimes, always rolling the stone, never reaching anything. I don't know if it's because I'm part of a culture that is so, so goal-driven, or if it's just because I'm coming up on middle age. (Shouldn't i have achieved this by now? Shouldn't I have done that? Shouldn't I be . . . etc.) Sometimes it's hard for me to sit with this being IS all it is . . .

. . . but what was that old song? Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing .. .

Gassho

Jen

[Jinyo]

I have a vague memory of writing an essay on Camus's ' Myth of Sisyphus - something about revolt, freedom and passion in the face of 'the absurd' - and why suicide is not an answer to a world devoid of meaning and purpose.

Mm.... and in a more cheerful vein:

'One must imagine Sisyphus happy'
- Albert Camus


Willow

[Nikola Mironija]

Interesting thing is that Cammus also used a Sisyphus as a metaphore. Though I haven't read it, I've heard that his solution was to "picture Sisyphus as happy."
When I heard about that, I thought at first (remember, I haven't read it) "What the hell should he be happy about? He's pushing a big friggin' boulder for nothing!". But, then again, why shouldn't he be happy? What makes pushing the rock such an inherently worthless work? Could it be that "worthines" of some work is, like beauty, in the eyes of a beholder? And there is no beholder without Sisyphus.
So, he pushed a Rock Buddha (YEEEEEAAAAAH! :need some kind of a rock 'n' roll smiley over here over the edge, and then went back down the hill so that he may roll him up and push him again.
These are my curent thoughts about this parable

[Nikola Mironija]

I have a vague memory of writing an essay on Camus's ' Myth of Sisyphus - something about revolt, freedom and passion in the face of 'the absurd' - and why suicide is not an answer to a world devoid of meaning and purpose.

Mm.... and in a more cheerful vein:

'One must imagine Sisyphus happy'
- Albert Camus


Willow

Great minds think alike

[Jinyo]

So in the cross-cultural mythical analogy / metaphor department, how are we to interpret the eagle eating Prometheus' liver while he is chained to the rock? :-D

It seems in Greek mythology nice things do not happen around rocks or stones. Managing life's burden = suffering I suppose.

'O alithestatos dromos pantote faneros einai. (sorry no classical greek script on my iphone)
Deep bows
Yugen

Seem to be having a day of book synchronicity! Moving swiftly on from Camus's take on Sisyphus to Ihab Hassan's take on
Prometheus in his experimental book 'The Right Promethian Fire' where Prometheus's fire is re-figured as the pain of mind - the torment of the vulture.

'... what premonitions of a new order did Prometheus glimpse there, chained to his rock? His answers riddle time'

sounds like a Koan

Gassho

Willow

[Yutai]

Thank you for this post. Good timing as I struggle with keeping my practice a routine and find myself tonight finally revisiting this wonderful forum and sangha.

Gassho,
Yutai, lindsayk

[Jundo]

I confess I have trouble with this sometimes, always rolling the stone, never reaching anything. I don't know if it's because I'm part of a culture that is so, so goal-driven, or if it's just because I'm coming up on middle age. (Shouldn't i have achieved this by now? Shouldn't I have done that? Shouldn't I be . . . etc.) Sometimes it's hard for me to sit with this being IS all it is . . .

. . . but what was that old song? Is that all there is? Is that all there is? If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing .. .

Gassho

Jen

Hi Jen,

One might sometimes get the impression that Buddhism in general, Zen in particular, is about how pointless and meaningless life is. I mean, the Buddha seemed to be talking about how unpleasant the world can be, and Zen folks are always going on about being "goalless" or "accepting things as they are". However, nothing can be farther from the truth, and this Way is all about finding Worth and Meaning ... and (in my view) an optimistic and positive way of living. (To put it in philosophical terms, the Buddha was constantly counseling again what he termed "nihilism").

In the constant moving forward of daily life, we find peace, freedom and fertile possibility!

It is not Sartre's "No Exit" ... but rather, a path and doorway to healthful, positive, fruitful UNION with "the other" that is this world and the people in it, and which is ultimately no "other".

Life is chock full of meaning, purpose and value. It has all the meaning, purpose and value that your little heart can give it. In fact, life is so much what your heart makes of it, whether peace or friction, goodness or bad. We may even feel, deep in our hearts, that this whole reality is like a river flowing somewhere ... and we are that very flowing. Swim well! The feeling that we are, for example, "unimportant" "without meaning" "just dust in a vast cosmos" or the like is not correct from a Buddhist perspective. Rather, all is Wholesome Whole when we drop all such silly judgments and self imposed value scales of big/small, diamonds or dust, important or unimportant. All are links in Indra's Net. When we drop our small human judgments of "meaning" vs. "no meaning" ... and thus discover something (here all along) which swallows whole all human ideas, a Meaning beyond small "no meaning/meaning".

In the end, Dogen was a mystic. So are all Buddhist writers of whom I can think.

There is an old Zen saying ... Nichi nichi kore kōnichi (日々是好日), Everyday is a good day, said by Yunmen, Kodo Sawaki and others. Here is some caligraphy by Kodo Sawaki with it:




Nonin Chowaney from Nebraska Zen Center has a simple, clear comment on this (Nonin, by the way, is a cancer survivor with one lung, a host of other health issues and a heck of a lot of fight) ...

As Taigu once reminded us above when this came up, "everyday is a good day" is not some simple bumper sticker, but includes the ugly, the sad, even the most terrible of days. Taigu says ...

A famous statement, thunderous, breaking through our beliefs that tomorrow will be great and yesterday was better, something not for the faint hearted, something for what has courage in us, not for the victim, the abused, the oppressed, the destitute, the jobless soul, the lonely one, the bored, the angry guy, the weeping eye... For all　these guys that we can sometimes be, a statement that says that As it is, raw, complete and intense, it is just good. It is good and we may cry, shout, beg, giggle, kick, strike or fly way...It is bigger than us, bigger than anything we can think of.

------------------------


Everyday is a Good Day - by Nonin Chowaney


A couple of years ago, it snowed in Omaha on April 29th. I had wanted to work in the garden that day and when I looked out the window, my heart sank.

Later, I walked downstairs and mentioned that it was snowing to Albert, one of our group. "Yes," he responded, "there's something quite beautiful about these late Spring snowstorms."

Indeed there is, if you can approach them with an open mind; if you approach them with complaint because there'll be no gardening, they can be a real pain.

Lama Govinda writes that, "All suffering arises from attitude. The world is neither good nor bad. It is solely our relationship to it which makes it either one or the other." Snow on April 29th, or any weather condition on any other day, for that matter, is neither good nor bad. Good and bad is a question of mental attitude.

Moment-by-moment, we create the world in the mind. We can look out and create a gloomy, depressing world on any day by the condition of mind we bring to it. A depressed mind can make a bright, sunshiny day black and dreary, and a contented mind can create heaven out of rain and storm.

I am reminded of the old Zen saying, "Every day is a good day." What determines this? The mind that dwells nowhere; the mind that accepts everything. This is nirvana.

Nirvana may be understood as the absence of greed, anger (or aversion), and delusion. In other words, it's a state of mind. If we can approach whatever life brings us with the mind free from greed, aversion, and delusion, or accept things as they are without grasping for more or turning away from what's there, we cultivate the mental state known as nirvana, quiescence, or, heart-mind at peace with what is.

This does not mean passivity. It does not mean that we lay back and not move. What it means is that we start from zero, from acceptance of our lives as they are, and move from there. In that way we are not kept from or hindered in our living by complaining, grousing, or blaming others for the conditions of our lives. Every moment, then, affords us the opportunity to practice awakening, nirvana, enlightenment. When we sit zazen, we cultivate this practice.

The instruction for zazen is to cultivate the mind that abides nowhere, the mind of non-attachment. We are to allow thoughts to come and go, to arise without denial or suppression and to pass away without clinging. Angry thoughts about the boss? Let them come and let them go. Contentment with a lover? Let it come and let it go. I can't garden because it's snowing? Let it come and let it go. This practice does not aim for any particular state of mind; it is in and of itself the awakened state; sometimes it is called "cultivating the natural condition of mind."

Buddha, the awakened one, taught the Way to end human dissatisfaction, and nothing more. He taught that the end to suffering is non-attachment, non-clinging. This is the practice of zazen. Gradually, we are able to also cultivate this practice when standing, walking, or lying down; our life itself is enlightenment.

A mind that can abide anywhere is always content, even when suffering greatly. This is liberation; suffering is gone through. We accept what comes, live it, and move on.

...

... One moment, pain and suffering; the next, joy and relief. This all occurs in the mind; we create the world we live in. We sometimes cannot change the circumstances we live in, but we can always change our attitude. If we can learn to let go, it will change by itself.

As Lama Govinda said, "All suffering arises from attitude. The world is neither good nor bad. It is solely our relationship to it which makes it either one or the other." So, even if it's a bad day, "every day is a good day."

http://www.prairiewindzen.org/everyday_is_a_good_day.html