Still the Same Body

Once upon a time there was a temple with a great mirror. The first abbess had a practice of meditating in front of it to see into her true nature. After that, each subsequent abbess would meditate in front of the mirror and write a verse. The fifth abbess, Princess Yodo, wrote this verse: 

Heart unclouded, heart clouded; 

standing or falling, 

it is still the same body

(from The Hidden Lamp, edited by Florence Caplow and Susan Moon)

It's still the same body. It's still the same body. It's still the same body. Certain parts of koans, songs, poems, stories, dreams, are persistent. They're the important bits, the parts I can't quite get my head around. There's no easy explanation that allows me to put them in a box and walk away. This line is that way for me.

A princess who is an abbess meditates while gazing into a mirror, the same one used by all the previous abbesses, and all the abbesses to come. She stares back at all of them, forward at all of them. The mirror hasn't changed. The center of the universe is right here, as the world moves around it. When I look at and into myself, that's what happens, as the world moves around me, there's no end to what I can see. 

The same body. The same time. I can see the way this moment is all there ever is or will be and it never ends, it is always here. And my body is the same body as long as there was matter, and probably before, because when could there have been a discontinuity? And I will always have it, this now, this body. Even as its elements scatter, it's still here. Standing, falling...

We have so many stories about bodies. Somebody I knew felt that her body changed when she was unkind, it became something unknown to her, tainted by what she had thought or done. When difficult things happen, we sometimes have to let go of our body for awhile, set it adrift like a boat, or cut the traces and let it wander away. But the koan says we can have ourselves back. There's nothing I can ever do to disqualify myself. Come home! all is forgiven! It's still the same body. 

For some of us, unbidden, we feel the pain of the world. And this may be more common than we're quite aware of. When something bad happens to other people, we feel it as our own pain, without knowing the reason, we become sad or even cry out, lament, wail and tear our hair. Is it my personal body, or is it the world's body? Is it bearable to hold each other so close? To care so much?

When my first baby had just started growing inside me I called her "the peanut" because it made sense that something that small would be both well-protected (which was reassuring) and undetectable. And she was undetectable, for a long time, except for making me feel vaguely queasy all the time. But I felt for her to move, waited for some sign that I had become two. They still call that by an old word, quickening.  And then, one day, something that could have been a bubble but wasn't, fluttered, and I knew that part of me was also someone else. And I felt a profound respect for the person inside me who was becoming a somebody. I remember lying on a large rock in the sun at the base of Snoqualmie Falls and at that moment it was clear that another being was in there. Still the same body. Out of nothing or everything, into being, still the same body. 

This is the body that has always held me, a me that both is and isn't limited. The same body that was star and stardust and gamete and zygote and blinked into awareness one day, who lived in a unitary reality, where everything and everyone was me. And the same body where I discovered that my mind made my body magically do something. And the body where I woke up to a particular me, that might be separate from other people and things. And the one where I will again not have a me, where I will fall down and not get up again. Back into nothing, or everything. At each stage of my being, it is still this same body. 

The question arises, is it too much, can I bear to have this huge body, this vast and boundless, awful, unimaginable, wonderful body? Can I hold it all, this whole world, this whole universe, from the beginning till the end of time? And the answer is yes, probably I can, because I am. Still the same body.

Rachel Boughton
rachel@flowermountainzen.org
www.flowermountainzen.org