Through the Dharma Gate

by Joan Sutherland

As I think about the shapes and forms that meditative practices take, I keep returning to the afternoon before the fateful night in which a man named Siddhartha would sit under a tree, and at the rising of the morning star, become the Buddha. On that long afternoon, Siddhartha took a bowl, went down to the river, and made a vow: “If this bowl floats upstream, I’ll become enlightened before tomorrow dawns.” He threw the bowl into the river and bent all his intention to its journey against the current, against the unceasing tumble of being and doing and becoming, making and unmaking, birth and growth and decay and death — against the unrelenting torrent of stuff and matter, of thought and feeling and sensation, to the source of it all, in its stillness and eternity.

That is the same intention we set as we take up a meditative practice: we throw our bowls into the river, hoping to find its source. And yet we set this intention as embodied beings, in an embodied world of shapes, colours, sounds, tastes, and smells. We begin practice with bodily acts — breathing, postures, gestures, sounds, offerings, rituals. These are accompanied by acts at a subtler level of embodiment, acts of the heart–mind: the stilling of thoughts, mindfulness of sensation and emotion, the contemplation of a koan, visualisation, prayer. We trust that the world’s radiant, eternal aspect is not outside our experience but an enlargement of it, and so it is with eyes and skin and hearts that we go out to meet it.

The bowl Siddhartha flung into the river did float upstream, but he chose to follow it by turning back toward the world. He bathed in the river, and then he went to sit under a tree. The world came to meet him, to offer its support: he encountered a grass-cutter, arms full of soft, fragrant green, who offered him some grass as a cushion.

On that first afternoon there was no formal Buddhist practice yet; there was only Siddhartha’s brilliant improvisation in a landscape of river and grass and tree. But over millennia we’ve added a gate to the landscape: We’ve created an edifice of meditation, made of an architecture of methods. Rather than examine its individual stones, let’s look at the gate in its original setting, there by the tree. Let’s look at what it’s like to sit in its shade, at the place where things come in and out, and meet each other.

There is the gate, always in the same place, enduring, unmoving, and yet with an opening that invites things to pass through it. There is the person who comes to sit at the gate, different every time, agreeing to stay put so that those things moving in and out of the gate can find her. The location of the gate — the forms of meditation — is fixed and known, but what will happen there can never be known ahead of time. The experience of sitting at the gate is made up, inseparably, of both what is repeated and what is spontaneous — what can only happen in this moment, in this place, amidst these circumstances with what we bring to the gate and what comes through it.

We sit down and gather ourselves. We are creatures of habit, using habit — a particular sitting posture, the smell of incense, the sound of a chant repeated many times — for our benefit, to bring body, heart, and mind together. In gathering ourselves we make ourselves available to be acted upon, to be marked by the worlds, visible and invisible, in which we sit. Available to what comes through the gate.