How Spacious the Meadow
A pastoral landscape in pen and brown ink; record of a painting in the collection of the Duke of Sutherland. Untitled, artist unnamed; 1635-1682. © The Trustees of the British Museum; Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
I reached for a reading from Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind to open meditation for last week's sangha. The first page I landed on was the teaching titled “Control,” which begins with this excerpt:
To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.
Zen teachings are enigmatic, the language circular and contradictory often, which creates puzzles and potential for sparks of insight. This brief line led to much thought and discussion about the nature of freedom and constraints. What are the right constraints for us to know freedom within? How spacious our meadow?
In this teaching, Suzuki elaborates to describe a variety of small paradoxes that point a way toward equanimity — which he describes as both freedom and “control.” Concentration and focus (constraints) in meditation are methods, but:
“...to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in the widest sense. Zen practice is to open up our small mind. So concentrating is just an aid to help you realize “big mind,” or the mind that is everything.”
In harmony with the yoga philosophy we have been exploring, Suzuki writes: rules make freedom possible. The yamas and niyamas similarly are ethical precepts that point toward freedom.
According to the Chinese elemental season of transition which we are in as we near the Solstice, we are in a time for digestion: for metabolizing what we have taken in.* I will leave you with Suzuki's cows and sheep, ruminating in the meadow. The first three yamas (ahimsa, satya, asteya) for reference and further digestion, are in the preceding blog posts.
Join us for Tuesday Sangha and Monday's Attune Body+Mind yoga class — just 2 more of each in 2020! There is a break in the usual programming for the last week of the month — join our mini-retreat to gently turn the year together.
* Thanks to my teacher Scott Davis for this reminder.
