Taking the Backward Step

 

By Gerry Hōshō Rickard

I remember a song from my childhood written and performed by the late great Irish/English comedian Spike Milligan called, I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas.

Its first lines were:

“I’m walking backwards for Christmas
Across the Irish Sea
I’m walking backwards for Christmas
It’s the only thing for me”

I was reminded about it when I came to write this article. I don’t know how Zen Master Dogen would feel to be compared with Spike Milligan, but he wrote the following words in Fukanzazengi:

“You should therefore cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away, and your original face will be manifest.”

The backward step. How many of us meditators repeatedly look outwards for the “answers?”

Many on the spiritual path look outside, to teachers, to a guru, or take refuge in the intellectual form of books, not knowing that all we have to do is to turn around and take the backward step to find our true nature.

Ramana Maharshi called this the self-inquiry of, Who am I? If we constantly ask ourselves this question, he says that we will go back to the source of who is asking this question, or to whom this question arises. This takes us away from intellectualising and thinking in concepts about what our true nature is—it is, after all, the thinking process that veils this place of awareness or consciousness that is always here. 

Stepping backwards is about asking ourselves:

“Who is aware?”

“What is aware?”

“Who is sitting?”

“Who is practicing?”

“Who is having these thoughts?”

And searching for any sense of the “me” in all of them. If, as Dogen says, body and mind drop away, we might find that there is only awareness here, only experiencing, or “awarenessing”.

This can be a scary place to go for many. But as John Daido Loori wrote:

“What is it that remains when the self is forgotten? People worry about that. Will I be the same? Will I like the same things? Will my friends recognize me? Of course! All you are letting go of is an idea. What is it that remains when the self is forgotten? Everything. The whole universe remains. The only difference is that there is no longer a notion that separates you from it”. 

By turning our awareness back upon itself, we are dropping away from thoughts, concepts, our body and all that we think we are. In Zen this is dying before you die.

When Shunryu Suzuki spoke of big mind and small mind, he was alluding to this. Big mind, or as he said, “the mind which includes everything” is the mind of awareness, the mind that lies behind all our thoughts, concepts and views. Small mind is the “mind which relates to something,” which always focuses and grasps onto objects. Big mind is fundamental to us, even before we perceive and construct something about the objects we are aware of. It is at the heart of us. It is our home. But we always seek it outside ourselves. By turning inwards, we can rediscover it.

We often hear the word “the seeker” in spiritual terms. We think that awakening is somewhere out there, something that is mysterious, esoteric and attainable if we practice the “right” way. As seekers, we spend time looking for an elusive “breakthrough” to obtain an awakening, realization or enlightenment. It is only after we make this breakthrough that we realize that there was nowhere to go to in the first place.

Zen refers to this as the gateless gate. There has never been any gate. There has never been any barrier between us and our true nature, it has always been accessible.

Paradoxically, then, it is only when we stop seeking and striving to become something, or find something outside ourselves, that our true nature is revealed to us. As Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj said: “The searcher is he who is in search of himself.” If we stop “seeking,” therefore, we will find ourselves. The seeker and the sought are one and the same. We are already here. 

This is something that is confirmed over and over again in Buddhism—the closeness of enlightenment.

We are already Buddhas. Awakening is already present within oneself. We just need to know how to look. 

It’s like the true story of the Golden Buddha of Bangkok. Back in the 1950’s a clay image of the Buddha began to crack in the humidity and heat of the city. When the monks took a closer look, they found that hidden within was a solid gold Buddha. The clay was used 600 years earlier to cover the original statue in order to trick invading armies who came to plunder and pillage. 

Senkei Shibayama, in the great Zen classic, A Flower Does Not Talk summarises it as follows: 

There is a Zen phrase, “The brilliant gem is in your hand.”…..Literally, this phrase means that the brilliant gem which everybody values so much and eagerly seeks for is in the hand of he who is seeking for it. Or, we can say that the true and invaluable jewel is not like diamonds and pearls that can be found elsewhere outside. You are born with it, and it is in your own hand. The brilliant gem here symbolizes Buddha Nature, or Dharma Nature.”

It turns out that what we have been actually looking for is the “looker” all the time; what we have been seeking is that which is actually doing the seeking. The seeker is therefore the sought, and the sought is the seeker. There is nothing to attain. How can we attain something that is always here?

Don’t search any further. Don’t get into the tangled jungle looking for the great enlightened elephant who is already resting quietly at home in front of your own heart. -Gendun Rinpoche

Dogen emphasized that enlightenment wasn’t something to be obtained somewhere or sometime in the future, but is already inherent within us, discoverable through practice.

He saw practice as enlightenment—a single, continuous process rather than something that we achieve in stages. Shunryu Suzuki famously said, “Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity.” There actually isn’t a “person” to be enlightened after all! He was subtly pointing to the idea that there is nothing to be attained. Striving for enlightenment is an ego-based attempt to achieve something special.

We practice and we live our lives fully in this moment. That is enough.

It’s important, though, not to turn self-inquiry into a technique. Otherwise, we create the duality between that which is turning back and that which is being turned into—i.e. we make an object of awareness. We simply practice the effortless effort of letting go of grasping onto our thoughts. We let go of our fixation on objects—sounds, thoughts, images—and simply allow them to arise and pass away. We move away from the mind that moves, into the mind of stillness.

In this way, the light is already being turned, and we are revealing what always has been here. 

This is what Zen describes as the pathless path. We are already the path and there is no path to follow. Like the Golden Buddha, our pure mind is always here, always close at hand. We don’t have to spend years finding it. We can simply recognize it in the moment. We have never been disconnected from it, we have simply obscured it with our thinking mind.

It is right here. It always has been. Waiting for us patiently to take that backward step, to come home, right in this moment.

Buddha is your mind

And the Way goes nowhere.

Don’t look for anything but this.

If you point your cart north

When you want to go south,

How will you arrive? – Ryokan

Maybe Spike Milligan was onto something after all. 

 

 

Gerry Hōshō Rickard is an Irishman living in Mozambique. He has a master’s degree in teaching mindfulness from the University of Bangor in Wales, and now teaches, leads retreats and online sessions in Mozambique and beyond (www.mindwise.me). A practicing Zen Buddhist he received the precepts from Roshi Joan Halifax at the Upaya Zen Centre in Santa Fe. His articles are part of his way to attempt to live up to his dharma name, Hōshō, which means “voice of the dharma.”

Photo: Pixabay

Editor: Dana Gornall

 

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