HONRAI NO MENMOKU GENZEN : The Original Face Appears

In the run-up to the publication of Shobogenzo Book One in February 1994, I indulged myself in a veritable end-gaining fest. By the end of it I was in a state of great irritability. I had constant pain down the right side of my neck and shoulder. All the stress-busting things I usually did in addition to sitting-zen, such as running, lifting weights, and stretching, didn’t make it better -- if anything they seemed to make it worse.

At that time, clutching at straws, I remembered an encounter I had in the Zen Centre in San Francisco ten years earlier, in 1984, when I had gone to America in dream-hero mode, on a mission to publicize my teacher’s book To Meet the Real Dragon. In the Zendo of the Zen Centre I had been struck by the easy uprightness of a Danish guy practicing there. When I asked him what was his secret he modestly gave the credit to the Alexander Technique. “I am student of the Alexander Technique,” he told me.

Remembering this ten years later, I went to the Maruzen bookshop in Shinbashi and placed an order for two books on the Alexander Technique. The books arrived together on a sunny day in the spring of 1994. I spent the whole afternoon and evening totally absorbed in them. I felt straight away that what I was reading about was going to change my life. In retrospect, I don’t regard either of them as books that I would particularly recommend, but the truth of Alexander’s discoveries shone through them nonetheless. I set about trying in earnest to track down an Alexander teacher in Tokyo.

Eventually, aided by a fellow seeker of the Buddha’s truth, the late Colin Lendrum, I tracked down the Alexander Teacher and improvisational dancer Imre Thormann, and started having lessons with him at his flat near Inokashira Park. I must have been a terribly difficult pupil -- I thought I knew it all already from having read the two introductory books. I remember walking from the station where we had arranged to meet and me excitedly telling Imre that the inhibition and direction Alexander wrote about obviously corresponded to the 3rd and 4th noble truths. Imre stopped me by saying, “OK. Let’s work!”

The big moment in our lessons came when Imre worked on me sitting in lotus. To get an idea of my habitual sitting posture at that time, push your chest forward as far as you can, then vigorously pull your shoulders back and down, and then pull your chin into your neck. Imre used his hands to mould me into a totally different shape, in which my head seemed to be absurdly far forward and my shoulders as if melted into nothing. It felt totally different and yet strangely familiar, like coming home after a very long time. The clincher was when Imre arranged two mirrors so that I could see myself from the side, sitting in the full lotus posture in a totally new way. “That is more your natural posture,” he said, and I knew with my whole being that it was true. Imre had caused my original face to begin to emerge. From that moment on I knew that I was going to throw myself into investigating and propogating the Alexander Technique as deeply and genuinely as I possibly could, without counting the cost.

Within a matter of weeks, having made the decision to return to England to train as an Alexander teacher, I found myself, during a farewell weekend visit to Abe Sensei’s dojo in Ohito, in the Izu peninsular, seeking out the house of a Zazen friend I had made there, Mochizuki San. I wanted to say goodbye before I left. Eventually, after asking around the locality, I found the Mochizukis’ house where I was ushered in for a cup of green tea before the Tokonoma alcove.

From the alcove Mochizuki San pulled out an oblong wooden box containing a treasure he wanted to show me: a facsimile of the original version of Fukan-zazen-gi written by Master Dogen when he returned from China, in his own hand. When he saw my reaction to it, without any hesitation whatsoever, Mochizuki San absolutely insisted that I must have it, that I must take it back to England with me. So here I am, now back in Aylesbury, looking at the scroll hanging on the wall. It reads from right to left and from top to bottom.

If you feel, as I felt, what a wonderful thing it is to see the original characters of the original draft of Fukan-zazen-gi, in Master Dogen’s own hand, don’t thank me -- thank Mr. Mochizuki of Ohito. Light a stick of incense and sit for half an hour in honour of his example of free giving.



The six characters shown above are:
HON root
RAI coming from
MEN face
MOKU eyes
GEN be manifest
ZEN before

HONRAI originally
MENMOKU face, features
GENZEN emerge, appear before one’s eyes

HONRAI NO MENMOKU GENZEN
“The original face appears.”

That is what can happen when we quit end-gaining -- body and mind spontaneously drop off, and the original face appears.

That is what an Alexander lesson is for -- to investigate how, when we quit end-gaining, our original face can begin to re-assert itself.

Isn’t that the end we all wish to gain -- to truly come back to ourselves, to regain the state of grace we experienced, before we knew the anxiety of separation, in our mother’s womb or at our mother’s breast?

There is nothing inherently wrong with the desire to gain this end. The wrongness comes in with reliance on wrong means. End-gaining means going for the end directly, without regard to whether one is continuing to accept and use the whole self in the process.

The secret is to gain the end, not by unconscious end-gaining but by attending to the proper means-whereby.

What this means in practice is described with unmatched clarity by Marjory Barlow in her 1965 Memorial Lecture (see www.the-middle-way.org), and she demonstrated it to me with unmatched clarity in her teaching room, viz:
• Recognize, as a stimulus to habitual patterns, the desire to gain an end.
• Give up (“inhibit”) this desire.
• Come back to awareness of the new means-whereby the self may be accepted and used as a whole in the gaining of the end in view.
• Allow the action, in which the end is gained, to happen.

Marjory used to say it is like a sticking plaster -- where you apply it, it works. It works if the end in view is to rise from a chair without losing one’s integrity. It works if the end in view is to sit in lotus allowing one’s original face to appear.

It sounds so simple, and it is. But it is not easy.

What actually happens when I have reacted with undue excitement to some little stimulus is that I end-gain for my original features, often calling out in an infantile way something beginning with “Ma.” It usually comes out as “Marion!” but it might just as well be “Master!” or “Mama!” Despite the external features of a big shaven-headed bloke who sits in the full lotus posture, inside I am like a baby exhibiting the full-blown Moro reflex, arms splayed out as if to say “Pick me up, Mummy!”

In end-gaining like this for my original features, I progress further than ever away from the original state of grace that I wish to regain.

The Flower of Dharma continues to turn like this, end-gaining begetting end-gaining, until such time as it turns into its opposite -- until the face of grim determination breaks into a smile; until the backward step of turning light around (EKO HENSHO NO TAIHO) is well and truly learned.