Fourth talk on Dogen’s Genjo Koan 2009 series. Norman refers to Suzuki Roshi and other commentaries in this series. Norman uses Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation found in “Moon In a Dewdrop”.
Third talk on Dogen’s Genjo Koan 2009 series. Norman refers to Suzuki Roshi and other commentaries in this series. Norman uses Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation found in “Moon In a Dewdrop”.
Third talk on Dogen’s Genjo Koan as found in “Moon In A Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahasi”.
Fourth and final talk on Dogen’s Genjo Koan as found in “Moon In A Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahasi”.
First talk on Dogen’s Genjo Koan as found in “Moon In A Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahasi”.
Second talk on Dogen’s Genjo Koan as found in “Moon In A Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahasi”.
First talk on Dogen’s Genjo Koan 2009 series. Norman refers to Suzuki Roshi and other commentaries in this series. Norman uses Kazuaki Tanahashi’s translation found in “Moon In A Dewdrop”.
In Norman’s third talk at the the Santa Sabina 2009 Sesshin Norman gives his second of two talks on koan Case 41 of the Book of Serenity “Luopo Close to Death”.
In Norman’s second talk at the the Santa Sabina 2009 Sesshin Norman gives his first of two talks on koan Case 41 of the Book of Serenity “Luopo Close to Death”.
Norman’s fifth and last talk on Dogen’s “Uji” or “Time Being” from his classical work “Shobogenzo”. Norman uses three translations in discussing this important work on Time: 1) “Moon in a Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahashi 2)”Shobogenzo Zen Essay’s by Dogen” by Thomas Cleary 3)Shasta Abbey Shobogenzo translation on line http://www.shastaabbey.org/1dogen/intro.pd The final minutes of this recording were unfortunately lost due to technical error.
Dogen’s Time Being (Uji) 5
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | September 16, 2009
Abridged and edited by Ryusen Barbara Byrum
I thought I would just go forward and see if we can make it to the end. I will read my version of the text and make some comments. So I won’t read the Tanahashi version, and you can just follow along.*
This is section number fifteen, where we left off last time:
“Yaoshan was sent by his teacher Shitou to study with Mazu. He asked, ‘I am familiar with the Buddha’s basic teachings, but what is the main point of Zen?’ And Mazu said, ‘For the time being have him raise his eyebrows and wink. For the time being don’t have him raise his eyebrows and wink. For the time being to have him raise his eyebrows and wink is right. For the time being to have him raise his eyebrows and wink is not right.’ Hearing this Yaoshan understood and said, ‘When I was studying with Shitou, I was like a mosquito trying to bite an iron bull.'”
So this is one of the times when something sounds like it’s coming out of left field. Raising the eyebrows and winking is a reference to a particular story in Zen -a very famous story. It’s the story of the first transmission and is the beginning of the Zen lineage. Once, when Buddha was on Vulture Peak, he held up a flower. When he held up a flower, nobody understood, but Mahakashyapa in the assembly understood and raised his eyebrows. When Mahakashyapa raised his eyebrows, Shakyamuni Buddha winked. This eyebrow raising and winking was the moment when they understood each other perfectly, without using words. So, what’s the main point of Zen? He refers to that story, which is the beginning of the Zen transmission.
So, what does that story amount to? It amounts to, first of all, this sense of true meeting, true intimacy and communication between two people. It refers to meeting in a deeper sense. Every time our senses really meet a sense object, it is this kind of meeting as well. And it refers to expressing the truth and passing on the truth. So it’s an active – interactive and active – expression. It’s often the case in Zen stories, in Zen phrases, that the story has to be understood on simultaneous levels. So it means all that, but it also means any activity. Winking and raising the eyebrows means anything that goes on. Wherever there’s life, there’s activity. In other words, in Zen, transmission is simply the ongoing activity of life in its most fundamental sense.
So, Mazu is saying, “What’s the point of Zen? It is the activity, the ongoing, living activity of expressing dharma, of intimately sharing dharma.” But then, he doesn’t want to set this up as some kind of doctrine or idea, so he asserts it, he denies it, he says it’s right, and then he says it’s not right.
So it sounds like, “Oh, God, there they go again, those Zen guys. They can’t leave well enough alone. They have a nice thing there, and then they have to go and muddy it all up with all these paradoxes and tricky ways of speaking. Why do they have to do that all the time? That is so predictable. Why do they do that? And doesn’t it make it sound like this doesn’t mean anything? It could mean anything. And it’s up for grabs, you know.”
But I think there’s a deeper point to it, as I look at it, and it is really the same point that Suzuki Roshi makes when he says, “Not always so.” In other words, isn’t this what we do? We get a really good idea, and then we set that up. We put out a shingle. A Zen shingle. And before you know it, we have customers, and then we have bills to pay, and taxes, and then we get in fights, and everything goes bad. So don’t put up a shingle. Don’t have a fixed truth. Don’t have a doctrine. That doesn’t mean there isn’t absolutely the right thing to do, the correct thing to do on every occasion. It’s just that it is different on every occasion.
So Dogen goes on: “Mazu’s expression is unique. Eyebrows and eyes are mountains and oceans, and mountains and oceans are eyebrows and eyes.” And again, you could understand this on two levels. On the one hand, it is symbolic. Mountains are like Mahakashyapa’s raised eyebrows. Mountains stand for the time of training, the student climbing the mountain of practice. And oceans are like Shakyamuni Buddha’s winking – the ocean of enlightenment, the ocean of awakening. But also, at the same time, mountains and oceans are just mountains and oceans – in other words, the actual mountains and oceans of this world – in all of their deep time, their primordial time. Every object of this world – every mountain and every ocean – is as it is, the whole of the truth. So everything in our lives, every moment is the whole of the truth, if only we could enter that moment.
To “have him raise the eyebrows” is to see the mountains. To “have him wink” is to understand the oceans. He is “right” because the whole world arises in him, and he comes alive through the activity of raising the eyebrows and winking, which he naturally does according to his conditions. He can also be “not right,” but this does not mean that he doesn’t raise his eyebrows and wink. There is no “not right,” just as there is no non-winking or non-raising. Something is always raising and winking, and we call it “right” or “not right.” In other words, raising and winking means life’s activity, which is always going on. So the whole world comes alive in our activity, and our activity is whatever it is, according to our conditions. We’re all different, and we all have different situations, inside of us and outside of us. But whatever it is that is given to us to be doing in this moment of our lives, the whole of the mountains and oceans of enlightenment are always there. So we are always “right” in the absolute sense, just because we are. We are always exerting our lives, and we can’t be not right, because we are. In other words, there’s a certain rightness in what is, when we really, profoundly appreciate what is.
Yet, also, in a relative sense, we do have right and wrong. We have right and not right. So Dogen is saying all of this. He is saying, “Yes, we honor the relative world of right and not right, but in the most profound sense, all of our activity – just being our activity, whatever it is for us – is the moment of transmission, is the moment of truth. It is the whole of Zen.”
Dogen goes on,
“Mountains are time and oceans are time. If not, there would not be mountains and oceans. Don’t think of mountains and oceans as one thing and time as something else. There is no other time but what is arising now. If there were, time would be cancelled out, and mountains and oceans would not exist. But time is never cancelled out, and mountains and oceans arise. And that’s why Buddha sees the morning star, awakens, and raises a flower. Seeing the flower, Mahakashyapa raises his eyebrows, and Buddha winks. This is time. This is every moment of time. This is the depth, the is-ness, the echo of time. All of time. All of the time. For the time-being.”
Number 16:
“Zen master Guixing of She is the heir of Shoushan, a descendant of Linji. One day he taught this: ‘For the time-being, awakening arrives, but not expression. For the time-being, expression arrives but not awakening. For the time-being, both awakening and expression arrive. For the time-being, neither awakening nor expression arrives.’ “
So it’s similar in a way – the four-part statement, which runs through all the possible negations and affirmations. It is typical in Zen, but it comes from the logic of Indian Buddhism. Here it is referring to one of the most important issues that is always raised in Zen practice: the relationship between the state or experience of truth or awakening, and the expression of it. The issue of expression is a huge thing in Zen. Zen is not really about meditation. Zen is really about action, about expressing your life. The relationship between the awakening and the expression of awakening is really important. So that is what he is talking about. Sometimes awakening arrives but not expression; sometimes expression but not awakening; sometimes both; and sometimes neither.
So I can explain these four positions in two different ways. You could think of them as stages of practice – one leading to the next. Or you could think of them as four ways of responding, as four possible ways of responding to situations, and – as I mentioned before – both interpretations are simultaneously true.
As stages of practice, the first stage is that we practice for awhile, and we begin to really feel our awakening. We really begin to feel the truth of the teachings, but we can’t express it. We don’t really know even how to think about it, let alone how to express it to someone else. It’s beginning to dawn on us, we’re beginning to feel it, but we don’t know what to make of it. In the second stage we now have gone further, and now we can express the truth, but as soon as we express it, we lose track of it, because we’re not really ready yet to express it, and we are caught by our expression. Maybe we don’t know that or maybe we do. Maybe every time we open our mouths, it sounds wrong. In the third stage we are finally ready to express ourselves. The truth is full within us, and we can express it. In the fourth stage we realize that that was too much. In other words, we realize that there is a subtle grasping going on there. We think that we are practicing Zen. We think we know something about it. We think we’re expressing it. So eventually we let go of all of that. We don’t think there is any awakening. We don’t think there is any special expression. We just think we are living our lives. Perceiving what we perceive. Responding according to the request.
So that is looking at the saying as four stages. Looking at it as four responses, it could be something like this. The first one: There is awakening but no expression. Just observe your life with love. Observe what happens with love. No need to respond. Just be with everything as love. Nothing is required. The second one: Forget about awakening. Forget about love and just respond like a human being. Just be ordinary and do what everybody does. Sometimes it’s too passive to observe with loving eyes and not respond. The building is on fire, so run outside. Grab somebody and take them out. Third: Respond with that loving-kindness. Respond with that awakening. The fourth: Respond in the sense by non-response.[DR4] Without any feeling of responding or not responding, without any feeling of awakening or non-awakening, just let go in everything you do. Go beyond everything that you do.
So now Dogen goes on to explain: “Both awakening and expression are the time-being. Both the arriving of the awakening and the expression, and the non-arriving ofawakening and expression are also the time-being. Before a moment arrives, its non-arriving is already here.”
I think the point here is to notice how right away we want to objectify time, as though it were some substance. Dogen is saying time is nothing – which is why it is everything. So it’s not a substance; it’s not a thing. It’s not like some kind of goo that is spread all over everything. Now there’s a plop of goo here, and there’s another plop of goo over there. It’s not like that. “Even when a moment of time is not here, it’s already here. All of time is arising now; even the non-arising is its arising.”
Then Dogen goes on: “Awakening is a donkey. Expression is a horse.” Using an old, commonplace Chinese saying. Donkey and horse, colloquially in ancient Chinese, meant ‘this and that.’ But in Zen the donkey was taken to mean an ass – somebody who is plodding along. And the horse is a stallion, which is galloping and leaping. So the donkey is like somebody who is struggling to study the Way, and a horse is like someone who has mastered the Way. “Awakening is a donkey and expression is a horse.” And here I am adding in my translation an explanation – “The hard work of practice in the trenches is awakening. The galloping tongue of a Zen master is expression. Being full of the teaching is expression – like the teacher. Never having been empty of the teaching is awakening – like with the student. Arriving [in the sense of arriving at awakening or arriving at understanding] does not mean that you have come from elsewhere. Not yet having arrived doesn’t mean that you are not already there.”
So if you have the experience, “Oh my God, this is enlightenment. Now I’ve got it,” this would be a sure sign that you have no idea what you are talking about, because you think that it arrived from elsewhere, and it wasn’t here before. The feeling is more like, “Oh! They were right. There is nothing to it. There never was. It’s always there this way.”
“Awakening, expression, being a student, being a teacher – then and now, yesterday and today, accomplishment and non-accomplishment – all are just pictures.” So, again, one of our themes tonight is an image or a concept of Zen simultaneously standing for several things. And all those things are important to keep in mind. So here I have used the language of teacher and student, but also it could be relative and absolute, or deep time and conventional time. These are all analogues of one another. “Student’ in Zen stands for the conventional – the effort. “Teacher” in Zen stands for the absolute – being fully realized. They are just positions. They’re just temporary pictures. Ultimately they are all the time-being, so they are all of ultimate value. It’s just shifting positions.
Number 17: “The time-being is like that. A moment is completely covered by its own time, but not by its before and after. Before and after are completely covered by before and after, but not by now.” So it’s as if he is saying that yesterday, today, and tomorrow are all right here. But it appears as if only today is here, because today covers today, and before and after cover before and after. It’s not that yesterday doesn’t now exist. It’s just that yesterday is covered by yesterday, and now is covered by now. Let me go on a little bit, and you will see how he does it. He uses “covered,” because the irony is – and the strangeness of our lives is – that things appear, and that’s why they are unknown to us. [I am afraid it is getting a little thorny here.] It’s as if the appearance of things blocks our knowing of them. It’s as if the absence of things is more real than the appearance of them. So appearance covers our lives. It’s like the old saying in Chinese, “A finger tip can’t touch itself.” It cannot experience itself. A moment of time, in appearing, covers itself. The covering is more than the conceptualization of it; it’s the actuality of its being there. It actually gets thornier, because the word sources from the word “hindrance.” It means blocking or obscuring your thought, with the implication that if you could remove that obscuring, you could have clarity.
Dogen often uses Buddhist terminology in a really sophisticated way, and the opposite way from how it is usually used. On the one hand, he is using the word “hindrance” and the word “cover” to indicate the actual existence of something. The existence of anything is its own hindrance. Because you exist, you can’t understand yourself. If you didn’t exist, there would be perfect understanding! So existence is, itself, its own hindrance; but without that hindrance, it doesn’t even appear.
“So before and after are completely covered by before and after, but not by now.” So they don’t appear as now. They only appear as before and after. “The time of awakening completely covers awakening. The time of expression completely covers expression.”
So the comment here is what I was saying before – that this is why we can never understand time, and we can never understand ourselves: Because in every moment that moment is completely covered. It’s overwhelmed by its own being. So when we’re awakened, we don’t know it. When we’re teaching, we have no idea that we’re teaching.
There is a sense of the beauty and intimacy in this. It’s always here in our lives. This is why practitioners could go into a cave and meditate for twenty-five years and not think that they were alone. This teaching tells you that every moment of being alive, of entering deep time, is completely embracing everything. Being embraced by everything. There is no way not to be sharing the joy of life, moment after moment, with everything.
* editor’s note: the quotation marks indicate Zoketsu’s translation of the Tanahashi version of the Dogen text.
Norman’s fourth talk on Dogen’s “Uji” or “Time Being” from his classical work “Shobogenzo”. Norman shares this talk with Jay Simoneaux, the shuso for this practice period. Norman uses three translations in discussing this important work on Time: 1) “Moon in a Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahashi 2)”Shobogenzo Zen Essay’s by Dogen” by Thomas Cleary 3)Shasta Abbey Shobogenzo translation on line http://www.shastaabbey.org/1dogen/intro.pdf.
Dogen's Time Being (Uji) 4
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer and Jay Simoneaux| September 9, 2009
Location: Deer Run Zendo
Abridged and edited by Ryusen Barbara Byrum
Last week I was saying that there is a paradox inherent in this text that we're studying. On the one hand, Dogen is communicating to us something about our lives that is important, a religious truth that he passionately wants us to get. He wants us to understand that our life as it is, even with all of its imperfections, is always immense, always whole, always profound. He knows that we don't understand this about our lives, so he really wants to tell us this. On the other hand, the paradox is that he doesn't want to make this into a concept, a doctrine, or a belief, because he knows that as soon as we make it into a concept, doctrine, or belief, it will be just another form of bondage. It won't be that which he is trying to tell us. So, in effect, he is desperately and passionately trying to communicate something to us which, at the same time, he wants to cancel out and erase – even as he is telling us.
Last time I was discussing the idea that we're not going to make [Dogen's teaching on time-being] into a doctrine, or hold onto a concept about our lives, and that we have to be willing to let go at every point. This is something that we have to deal with all the time. So, unfortunately, we've got fixed ideas – like the idea of "me." There's a big difference between "me" as a concept that I am clinging to, and "me" as an ongoing flow of experience. This ongoing flow of experience is more like what Dogen is speaking about.
I had asked us all to look this week at our fixed ideas, our concepts, and to see if we could identify them. To see what it felt like to let them go, to see what it felt like to hold onto our ideas – even our ideas about who we think we are and what we think we're doing. Could we not be so fixed and rigid about those ideas? What would that feel like? What does it feel like when we notice our self-concept or ideas about our lives? We do hold them rigidly, so what does that feel like?
And now let's hear from Jay.
[Jay Simoneaux speaks:]
Sixty years go by, and you wake up one day, and you're sitting behind a lectern, wondering what to say about Dogen. Norman asked me to start with reading a couple of the sections from Time-Being. So this is section 12:
You may suppose that time is only passing away, and not understand that time never arrives. Although understanding itself is time, understanding does not depend on its own arrival. People only see time's coming and going, and do not thoroughly understand that the time-being abides in each moment. This being so, when can they penetrate the barrier? Even if people recognized the time-being in each moment, who could give expression to this recognition? Even if they could give expression to this recognition for a long time, who could stop looking for the realization of the original face?According to the ordinary people's view of the time-being, even enlightenment and nirvana as the time-being would merely be aspects of coming and going.
So I wrote my own version of this paragraph: "The future remains a concept. The idea of ourselves projected forward, never to arrive. Realization and truth abide whether or not we understand. Our usual sense of time, something arriving from the future and receding into the past, clouds and covers entry into the present moment of awareness. When can we get past our conceptual world view? Who is it that can express realization? Who is it that can really put aside seeking advantage? From our ordinary viewpoint, realization and nirvana would merely become ornaments decorating our personal histories. This is called swimming with our boots on."
Section 13:
The time-being is entirely actualized without being caught up in the nets and cages. Deva kings and heavenly beings appearing right and left are the time-being of your complete effort right now. The time-being of all beings throughout the world in water and on land is just the actualization of your complete effort right now. All beings of all kinds in the visible and invisible realms are the time-being actualized by your complete effort, flowing due to your complete effort. Closely examine this flowing. Without your complete effort right now, nothing would be actualized, nothing would flow.
Dogen says that our whole-hearted, sincere practice actualizes the time-being, that it brings it into effect and sets it in motion. Somehow our best effort, graceful or not, brings forth the entire universe, and this universe remains free from ideas and concepts. Dogen says that we must look closely at this point.
When I learned that I was going to be shuso, I went for a practice interview with Norman. I confessed my deep unease and fear of speaking publicly in sesshin. Norman, in his usual way, was attentive and understanding. He said, "Yes, these talks can be nervous making. Even more so, talks during sesshin. You become sesshin nervous." Gulp! Then the very next day, Norman announced at a gathering, "In addition to the talks at sesshin, Jay will give two seminar talks on Dogen." Gulp, gulp!
So these talks have weighed on me over the last several weeks. And my homework consisted of thinking about, "Who is it that gets so nervous, speaking to his friends? And who is it that gets so upset about what he is going to say or not say or say wrong?" Sometimes that offered relief, but not often. [Laughter.] Mostly I have existed in what I would call "a warm panic."
What do I have to say about Dogen? I have two basic responses to his writings. The first response is that I get a glimpse of the dharma. This is like catching something out of the corner of my eye – a glimmer in the shadows. And when I turn to face it fully, it's gone. It's not graspable, but still a sense of inspiration lingers. The second response to his writing feels something like facing an impenetrable thicket of entangling vines – no way in and no way out.
This morning I was at work at a construction project, working with some really friendly, nice, good carpenters, and I said, "I'm out of my mind with nervousness. I've got to give this talk."
And they said, "Talk? Well, what are you going to talk about?"
I said, "Well there's this 13th century mystic named Dogen, and I have to say something about Dogen."
And they said, "What did Dogen say?"
Now you have to understand that we're in a job site. It's loud. People are running around. There is dust in the air. There's hammering and sawing. It's crazy, and so they asked me about Dogen.
I said, "Actually we're talking about time. How I'm always placing myself in the future, and that makes the future seem real, and it makes my imaginative picture of myself seem real." I thought that was pretty good. [Laughter.]
Then Michael, my good friend Michael – a terrific carpenter, a great guy – said, "Well, that's silly. If we don't plan for the future, nothing will happen."
I thought he had a good point. [Laughter.]
So sometimes Dogen's poetry for me is a breath of fresh air. At other times, more frequently, I am lost; I am adrift. Maybe this was Dogen's intention: Reveal the dharma and then dismantle any and all concepts we want to construct around his teaching. So my experience of studying Dogen is up and down. Some phrases really inspire me, and some knock me out. For example, the end of section eleven, which we read last week:
Vigorously abiding in each moment is the time-being. Do not mistakenly confuse it as non-being. Do not forcefully assert it as being.
To me that is so beautiful. It just knocks me out. It calls out, "Let's try some zazen." It is really compelling. I think I heard that in several peoples' comments tonight – about holding ourselves not so strongly. Not holding views so strongly.
One of the things I want to talk about is moments. The term "moments" is used quite a bit by Dogen and by Katagiri Roshi and by the Buddha.
Vigorously abiding in each moment is the time-being.
So what is a moment? Are moments the building blocks of time, where a bundle of moments makes a second? And sixty seconds makes a minute – minutes, hours, and so on, for a lifetime? Is a lifetime moments stacked one on top of the other? Or are the moments "vigorously abiding" something else entirely? I have been looking for moments this last week. Webster's defines moments as "indefinite, short period of time." So while moment as a word is concrete and seems like it refers to something real, something measurable, it really refers to something absolutely vague and unbounded. I can't locate a moment. Where is it? What is it? Before, I thought I knew; and now, not so much.
Another aspect of Uji that I want to mention is the description of the real present in contrast to our usual understanding of time. This is from Katagiri's book Each Moment is the Universe:
In being-time, Dogen Zenji constantly encourages us to see time from a different angle by being present at the source of time. The source of time is the place where you can see your human life from a broad view. We usually think of time as streaming from the past through the present to the future. But at its source, time is not like that. There is no stream of time from the past to the present to the future.
This is the part I really like:
The past is already gone, so it does not exist. The future has not yet come, so it also does not exist. So the past and future are nothing. No time. Then, is the present all that exists? No. Even though there is a present, strictly speaking, the present is nothing, because in a moment it is gone. So the present is also nothing. Zero. No time, no present, no form of the present. But the nothingness is very important.
The real present is not exactly what you believe the present to be. In everyday life we constantly create some idea of what the human world is, because we are always thinking about how things were in the past or how things will be in the future. When you are thinking about the past and future, the contents of the present are just imaginary pictures of the past and future – pictures fabricated by your consciousness, so it is not the real present. The real present is the full aliveness that exists before your conceptual thinking creates an imaginary world through human consciousness.
I really enjoy this, because I can make some sense of it, and for a moment I am not covered in doubt.
Barbara Byrum emailed me this really great question. "What do you think the relevance of Uji is for our everyday practice?" And that's my question. So what do you think? What is the relevance of Uji to our everyday practice? Does it have relevance to your practice?
[Norman continues:]
I attended those talks that Katagiri Roshi gave at Green Gulch in the late eighties. So when you were reading, just now, it was like I was there again, in that moment. Sometimes I have that experience – whether it is memory or experience, it is very strong. And I could feel my body sitting there. I remember the spot in the room where I was sitting when he was giving that talk. And maybe he was saying those things that you were just quoting. So, just now, it was a very immediate experience of that – more than a memory. It actually seemed like that moment was very real. Tonight. So it's strange, don't you think? We're always living in that kind of situation. You were saying those words, so that evokes that experience in me, but where was that time? It was there anyway. You didn't make it appear by quoting that. It was already there, and so my whole past was already there in every moment. I guess I have a weird everyday life, because, for me, that kind of experience is thoroughly typical. There is a strange quality of time that's there in everyday life. There's a depth to everyday experience, because it's everyday experience for the time-being. The time-being always has this in it. Maybe I'm just weird.
[Jay speaks:] I think so. [Laughter.]
[Norman speaks:] It's a kind of déjÃá vu. I wrote about it in Sailing Home. To me, déjÃá vu is not some strange, quirky thing. It's a powerful experience – time.
Norman’s third talk on Dogen’s “Uji” or “Time Being” from his classical work “Shobogenzo”. Norman uses three translations in discussing this important work on Time: 1) “Moon in a Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahashi 2)”Shobogenzo Zen Essay’s by Dogen” by Thomas Cleary 3)Shasta Abbey Shobogenzo translation on line http://www.shastaabbey.org/1dogen/intro.pdf.
Dogen's Time Being (Uji) Talk 3 of 5
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | September 2, 2009
Abridged and edited by Ryusen Barbara Byrum
Last week we were reading in Uji about the past as a place in time, a unit in time, or as a flavor of time. Does the past actually exist or not? What does the past feel like? And when we say the past, do we think about being a child, or the past an hour ago, or the past a moment ago? How does it condition the present? What's the feeling tone or flavor of passing time in your life? We were asking everybody to tune into that during the week. See if you can notice how time in the past, whatever that may be, surfaces and affects your days.
I would like to continue with what I was doing before. I'll read a section from Kaz's (Tanahashi) translation; I'll pause a moment for everybody to digest that; and then I'll read my interpretive version of that same section.
So we're up to the eighth section:
The time-being has the quality of flowing. So-called today flows into tomorrow, today flows into yesterday, yesterday flows into today. And today flows into today, tomorrow flows into tomorrow.
Because flowing is a quality of time, moments of past and present do not overlap or line up side-by-side. Qingyuan is time, Huangbo is time, Jiangxi is time, Shitou is time, because self and other are already time. Practice-enlightenment is time. Being splattered with mud and getting wet with water is also time.
Just a word before I read my version of that. This is a very difficult thing to talk about. Here Kaz translates time as "flowing." Time is flowing. The Shasta Abbey translation is that time has "continuity." Cleary says that time is "passing." And conventionally that's how we talk about it. We say, "Time passes." Time doesn't stand still. Time doesn't get bigger or smaller. It seems to have an even, perfectly regulated continuity. No lumps. No glitches. No one moment jumping over another, getting out of sequence. It seems to go along really nicely. We can count on it.
The trouble is that all these words – continuity, flow, passing, and so on – are metaphors that must only make sense in relation to things. We were saying earlier that time is exactly nothing, but all these words only make sense in terms of things – as in water flows. If you're standing by the banks of the stream, there's flow, there's continuity, there's passage. You are standing on the bank watching something flowing by. But the trouble is that all these metaphors are not even inherently – though Dogen can't help but use them – what time it is about. Time is exactly not like water flowing, or like anything else that we can talk about in physical terms, because we're not standing on the bank. There is no bank. There's nothing that exists that could be out of time. So even though time passes, or seems to pass, it can't flow in the way that anything else flows.
So that is background to this section. Here's my version: "For the time-being can't ever be static or still, because it isn't anything at all. It could only move, flow, or pass, and then it is gone before it arrives. You can catch a cup of water from a stream flowing by, but you can't catch time. We speak of today, but today is already tomorrow. Today is already yesterday. But since yesterday is also not a something, it isn't anything at all. Yesterday is already today. Still, each time does have its appearance and its function, and each time holds everything. So today is already today, and tomorrow is already tomorrow. Because of this quality of time (although we can't really say that time has qualities), there can never be any glitches. Moments don't pile on top of one another, nor do they line up, end-to-end. Qingyuan is the time-being. Huangbo is the time-being. Jiangxi is the time-being. Shitou is the time-being. Because "self" is the time-being, and "other" is the time-being, these great masters are each different, and they share the time-being and do not share it. Also, they are the same, because, in essence, they are just for the time-being. That's all they are, or were, or will be – exactly like you and me. Their practice-enlightenment – and that's always one word for Dogen, "practice-enlightenment" – is the moment of practice." (The idea of practice-enlightenment is central to our practice. We're not practicing for a future enlightenment. You can see now why that term – that concept – is so crucial for Dogen. Behind it is Dogen's whole idea, his whole feeling for time.) "So their practice-enlightenment is only for the time being, as is ours. Struggling and helping each other through our struggles. This is also only for the time-being."
So, Dogen's point is that we always miss the point. We do see time as the medium in which we are operating. We do see time as flowing, with all the various fish and us in it. We think that the ancient masters are upstream. They lived in the past, upstream, and they were really great. And we are in the present, downstream from them. And we're not so great. They're enlightened and we're not. However, we have some hope that if we continue swimming downstream, we can be good enough, and we can be enlightened. This is exactly what Dogen is arguing against. He's saying "Yes, conventionally there is an upstream and downstream. Conventionally there is a self and other. But at the deepest level of reality, there isn't. Time is always just for the time-being. It doesn't come from anywhere. It doesn't go anywhere. So self and other, past and present, enlightenment and struggle, are all just for the time-being. As such, they share something much more than the differences."
Next one, section 9,
Although the views of an ordinary person, and the causes and conditions of those views, are what the ordinary person sees, they are not necessarily the ordinary person's truth. The truth merely manifests itself for the time-being as an ordinary person. Because you think your time or your being is not truth, you believe that the sixteen-foot golden body is not you.
However, your attempts to escape from being the sixteen-foot golden body are nothing but bits and pieces of the time-being. Those who have not yet confirmed this should look into it deeply. The hours of Horse and Sheep, which are arrayed in the world now, are actualized by ascendings and descendings of the time-being at each moment. The rat is time, the tiger is time, sentient beings are time, buddhas are time.
"Although we all have our views, and we all have sensible reasons and causes for those views, these views are not what we really are. They don't encompass the simple truth of our being for the time-being. That simple truth merely manifests itself for the time-being as you and me and our various views. Because we don't realize this and believe so much in our views, we believe we know who and what we are, and who and what others are. We are convinced that we are ordinary persons and not enlightened buddhas. So although this may seem touchingly humble, the truth is we're frightened of our own awesomeness. We're trying to escape being what we really are, because we think it's too much for us. But even as we try to do this, in the very doing of it, we're manifesting the time-being, and our immensity is never hidden. And if we don't see this yet, we just need to look more deeply. The hours and weeks and months and years that paint a picture of a world are nothing other than the endless risings and fallings, the shiftings and ruminations, of the time-being. Being yourself is the time-being itself. Being a buddha is the time-being itself."
Let's go on a little bit – number 10,
At this time you enlighten the entire world with three heads and eight arms; you enlighten the entire world with the sixteen-foot golden body. To fully actualize the entire world with the entire world is called thorough practice.
To fully actualize the golden body – to arouse the way-seeking mind, practice, attain enlightenment, and enter nirvana – is nothing but being, is nothing but time.
"The time-being lights up the whole world. Our anger and confusion light up the whole world. Our wisdom, our love, lights up the whole world. And the whole world lights up the whole world. That's what we call thorough practice. Becoming a buddha, going through the steps and stages of a buddha's career, arousing compassion and commitment, practicing all the virtues, becoming enlightened, entering nirvana – this is just for the time-being. It's what the time-being always is, was, and will be."
I want to do just one other section, because it has to do with what I would like us to think about for this next week. The next one is section 11:
Just actualize all time as all being; there is nothing extra. A so-called "extra being" is thoroughly an extra being. Thus, the time-being half-actualized is half of the time-being completely actualized, and a moment that seems to be missed is also completely being. In the same way, even the moment before or after the moment that appears to be missed is also complete-in-itself the time-being. Vigorously abiding in each moment is the time-being. Do not mistakenly confuse it as nonbeing. Do not forcefully assert is as being.
"So just constantly investigate the time-being, and there's nothing beyond this. Even something beyond this would be nothing other than the time-being, because we can never limit, enclose, define, know, or appreciate the time-being. And still, it is completely the time-being, because half of the time-being is all of the time-being. And even a moment missed is a moment fulfilled, as is the moment before the moment missed and the moment afterward. The time-being is always completely fulfilled and incompletely fulfilled. It's just for the time-being. Don't think of it as non-being, but don't think of it as the time-being either."
So that's a good segue to what I would like us to think about and look at this coming week. Clearly, as this section makes most obvious, there is a paradox at the heart of what Dogen is doing in this essay. He's definitely trying to communicate something to us. He wants to tell us that every moment of time, every moment of being, is our life. And our life, even with all its many imperfections, is always whole and always deep, if only we could look at it. He's telling us this, and yet, he really wants to avoid making this into another doctrine, concept, or idea. We're always making everything into something. So he's trying to do this very difficult thing of trying to communicate something that he's serious about, and that's really important for our living, if not the most important thing. And at the same time, he wants to avoid making it too clear or making it too pat so that we now hold this up as a banner. He wouldn't be doing this if he didn't think that it would really make a difference to us to have the right idea about our lives. It does make a difference, and at the same time, he doesn't want us to build a big edifice out of this idea.
The implications of that for our lives are really immense, because you can't not have some idea. Dogen knows that we're going to have some idea about our lives, so we should have an idea that's fruitful, rather than an idea that is nothing but bondage. But if we cling to that idea, no matter how fruitful it is, it becomes bondage. And yet we have to have ideas and concepts and identities. So that's the point: How do we hold the things that we think? How do we hold our thoughts, our identities, our concepts in such a way that they don't oppress us? In such a way that they don't become fixed, and become cannon fodder for more suffering that is aimed at ourselves or at someone else?
For instance, our favorite idea of all: Me. This is our favorite idea, right? Me! There's a big difference between "me" as a fixed concept and "me" as a lightly held, ongoing experience. We're not looking for the disappearance of me. That will come soon enough. We're looking for the possibility of me as a lightly held, ongoing experience. What does it feel like to do that, and what does it feel like to have a fiercely grasped concept of me?
So study your fixed ideas this week. Take a look. When is it that you're holding onto a concept such as "This is what is really happening," or "This is what I really am," or "This is why I don't like this"? Whatever it is. Is it possible to hold your ideas in a different way, so that they no longer become sources of suffering? So that they can open a door towards liberation?
Norman’s second talk on Dogen’s “Uji” or “Time Being” from his classical work “Shobogenzo”. Norman uses three translations in discussing this important work on Time: 1) “Moon in a Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahashi 2)”Shobogenzo Zen Essay’s by Dogen” by Thomas Cleary 3)Shasta Abbey Shobogenzo translation on line http://www.shastaabbey.org/1dogen/intro.pdf.
Dogen’s Time Being (Uji) 2
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | August 26, 2009
Abridged and edited by Ryusen Barbara Byrum
What I would like to do now is go through some more sections of the text, and do what I did last time: give you my paraphrase, my impressionistic, interpretive translation. I’ll pause a little bit for you to feel that section for yourself, then I’ll read my interpretation, and then we’ll see if anyone has anything to say.
I am starting at section 4 in Kaz’s version:
Know that in this way there are myriads of forms and hundreds of grasses throughout the entire earth, and yet each grass and each form itself is the entire earth. The study of this is the beginning of practice.
When you are at this place, there is just one grass, there is just one form; there is understanding of form and no-understanding of form; there is understanding of grass and no-understanding of grass. Since there is nothing but just this moment, the time-being is all the time there is. Grass-being, form-being are both time.
Each moment is all being, is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment.
I’ll remind us all that in the previous section Dogen had just been talking about the self. He had been saying that when you look at the self closely, you see that the self and the world are really the same thing. If you look closely, you really can’t limit the self – it just continues on to include the whole world. He says the self arrays itself as the form of the entire world. And then he says that the self is time.
So, in other words, space is time, and self is space and time. This is one of the great, deep secrets of meditation practice. If you really sit in meditation and enter the breath fully, you see everything. You don’t need to see anything more than what is in this one breath, because everything is complete – right here.
Here is my interpretive translation:
“Understand, therefore, that there is no end to the variety and diversity of the world. And no one will ever encompass it all objectively. And yet, each and every thing in the world encompasses the whole of the world. To study this fact, to experience it, to stop wishing for otherwise and elsewhere, is the real beginning of practice. Knowing this, you are not looking for something else. You see that wherever you are, whatever you are, all things are always included and nothing more is needed. Knowing this, there is always the effort to understand things as they appear, and the recognition that you can never understand anything, because everything is too immense to be understood.”
There’s actually a wonderful footnote for this very passage in Cleary’s translation. He said the following: “Clarifying and sharpening relative understanding, while at the same time being aware of the ultimate inconceivability of existence in itself, is a Zen art.” I think that is really good. It is one of the pith secrets of our practice. “Clarifying and sharpening relative understanding, while at the same time being aware of the ultimate inconceivability of existence in itself, is a Zen art.”
So the idea is that we are not uninterested in the world. We are as interested as we could be in the relative world – understanding what makes ourselves tick, what makes our friends tick, how does the world work? Why is the economy so bad? Why is the government in a mess? How can we make it better? Why are our children so confused? Why are we so confused? Whatever we can learn about the world, whatever our field of endeavor, we want to learn as much as we can and be as skillful as we possibly can about the relative world. And at the same time, absolutely understanding and never forgetting that everything is fundamentally inconceivable. You can’t understand anything. Really.
So these two things are not in contradiction. You’d think that if we recognize that everything is inconceivable, we wouldn’t bother or care to learn about anything. Who cares? Or, on the other side, if we were really interested in the relative world, you’d think that we’d abhor the idea that things are inconceivable and that we can’t understand them. But Zen is the art of holding these two things in dynamic tension, and, in fact, they support one another. Because the way in which you can understand the relative world is going to be different when you understand also that nothing can really be known. And the way you hold the fact that nothing can really be known is very different when you take a huge interest in the world around you.
And this is really the heart and soul of our practice — when you think about it, the heart and soul of zazen. Because in zazen you are not trying to push away and be uninterested in all the stuff that comes into your mind. You are interested in your body and your mind and everything that arises, but you also know that none of it explains anything. None of it can be encompassed. It is all inconceivable.
So my version was that there is the effort to understand things as they appear, and also the recognition that you can never understand anything – because everything is too immense to be understood.
I’ll go on and finish my interpretation of this section. “Since there is nothing but just this moment, ‘for the time being’ is all the time there is. Everything, in being what it is, is all the time there is. All the time there is, is all the being there is – all the myriads of worlds.” Think about it. Is this moment lacking in anything? Is it lacking in any time? Is it lacking in any world? Can you see that everything is always here, always full and complete – wherever you are and whatever you are?
So to go on a little bit. I’ll read Dogen and then I’ll give my version. Section 5,
Yet an ordinary person who does not understand buddha-dharma may hear the words ‘the time-being‘ this way:
For a while I was three heads and eight arms. For a while I wasan eight- or sixteen-foot body. This is like having crossed over rivers and climbed mountains. Even though the mountains and rivers still exist, I have already passed them and now reside in the jeweled palace and vermillion tower. Those mountains and rivers are as distant from me as heaven is from earth.
It is not that simple. At the time the mountains were climbed and the rivers crossed, you were present. Time is not separate from you, and as you are present, time does not go away. As time is not marked by coming and going, the moment you climbed the mountains is the time-being right now. This is the meaning of the time-being.
Does this time-being not swallow up the moment when you climbed the mountains and the moment when you resided in the jeweled palace and vermillion tower? Does it not spit them out?
So this is my interpretive version. What I’m doing, to a great extent, is explaining in my translation the different references and de-mystifying them. “Yet an ordinary person, with a conventional view of time and being, may understand the time-being in relation to spiritual practice like this: ‘At one point in time I was a deluded, angry person, but later on I became enlightened. That is, I went through an unfortunate past, that really existed, to a really existing present in which I am enjoying the fruits of my spiritual endeavors. And that past is far beyond me now.'”
So isn’t this what we are all hoping for? But he says, “No, it’s not that simple. In the so-called past, you were you, and as we now know, the you that you really are is all of time and all the world. So although time appears to pass away, in fact it also always remains. Time is always time. It does not truly pass into some imagined realm we call ‘the past.’ Time is always time. It doesn’t come, and it doesn’t go. So your deluded past is still here for the time being. It doesn’t go away, and you don’t go beyond it. The meaning of impermanence – of time’s coming and going – is exactly that you are time, and all of time is exactly now, here, in time, for the time-being.”
“The time being swallows up the past and the present and spits them out. Time is always eating and excreting itself. So don’t be so sure you know what the past has been. And don’t be so sure you know what’s going on right now. You should be more doubtful and more humble about your spiritual accomplishments, because you haven’t changed at all. Time-being includes everything, and also much more.”
And here I’ve added the implied doubt. I think in this passage the intention is that we would all recognize how time looks to the ordinary, average person. We’d all recognize ourselves and say, “Yeah, that’s right, that’s how it looks to me.” And what he’s telling us is that you should be more doubtful about that, and you should be more humble and more willing to experience your life, rather than measure it in terms of spiritual progress, or thinking that you have gone beyond yourself in the past, to the present, where you’re getting better. You are just committed to being with your practice and with your life in this moment – with openness and questioning and not-knowing.
[After some questions and answers.]We can all agree there is no past. So we agree on that and then go on to the next day, and yet we experience a past. So what Dogen is saying is that we will experience a past. How do we understand that? How do we work with it? How do we live with it? What he’s saying is, “Don’t think the past is just dead behind you somewhere.” And I think we all understand this in our own way. The past is right here. Everything that ever happened to you is operative in everything you do and in every word that comes out of your mouth. We don’t know if the past ever happened or not – but we certainly know what we are now. And there it is. It’s here in our present functioning. And it’s the time-being.
It’s a very hopeful thing, in a way. Because otherwise you could say, “All these bad things happened to me in the past, so I’m screwed. There is no way that I am going to have a decent life here.” But he is saying, “No, the past is operative right here. If you enter the time-being this moment, your life is the life of Buddha. Your life is the life of awakening, regardless of the content of the past. The question is how you understand the past and how do you hold it? You could certainly understand the past in such a way that you are screwed – “No way. I give up.” And you could live that life, and a lot of people do. Or not thinking that way but just reacting to the past in such a strong way that you create problems for yourself all of the time, and you say, “Well, it’s because of my past.” Well, yes, you did have that past, but at the same time, it’s the way you’re holding and understanding that past and reacting to it that is really the source of the present anguish. If you understood it in the way that Dogen is speaking about, it’s very uplifting, and spiritually there is always possibility, no matter what happened in the past.
Okay, one more. This is number 6:
Three heads and eight arms may be yesterday’s time. The eight- or sixteen-foot body may be today’s time. Yet, yesterday and today are both in the moment when you directly enter the mountains and see thousands and myriads of peaks. Yesterday’s time and today’s time do not go away. Three heads and eight arms move forward as your time-being. It looks as if they are far away, but they are here and now. The eight- or sixteen-foot body moves forward as your time-being. It looks as if it were nearby, but it is exactly here. Thus, a pine tree is time. Bamboo is time.
So, my version: “It may be true that in the past you were deluded and angry, and that in the present, at least for the time being, you are enlightened. Yet the past and the present are both here in the high, wide, and endless vista we call ‘now.’ Yesterday’s time and today’s time do not ever go away. There is nowhere they could go to that wouldn’t also be just for the time-being. Your deluded past moves forward with you, as you are. It may seem that it is far away, but it is always with you for the time being. Sometimes it may seem close, but it is even closer than it seems. It is exactly arising now. Time-being is eternal, unmoving time. And it is the passing hours, days, months, and years of a lifetime.”
Maybe we could take a moment or two to meditate with how we hold and feel about the past – our own personal past. So settle your body and breath. When your mind is a little quiet, bring up some image or feeling that you have about the past. It could be yesterday, or it could be fifty years ago. Whatever image of the past or sense that comes into your mind first. Just breathe with that image or sense of the past and be with it for a moment. Notice how you’re feeling about it – how you’re holding it. How real you take it to be. How liberating it is. How restricting it is. How heavy, how light. Just be open and curious about it.
Let’s just do one more section, and then we’ll close. Number 7,
Do not think that time merely flies away. Do not see flying away as the only function of time. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason that you do not clearly understand the time-being is that you think of time only as passing. In essence, all things in the entire world are linked with one another as moments. Because all moments are the time-being, they are your time-being.
So my reading of it is: “Don’t think time passes. Don’t see time passing as the only way time goes. If time only passed, there would be a gap. You would be here, and time would be over there. But as you are time and time is you, and you are here, time has not passed at all. To think of time as only passing is to misunderstand yourself – to construct a gap between yourself and yourself. Whether they exist in the same moment or in many different moments, all things in the world that are, are linked to one another intimately. Whether they are the same moment or different moments, all moments are just for the time-being. And it must be your time-being, because you are.”
Think about all the ways that things and people are different from one another. People are so different from one another. Men are different from women. People in one language group are different from people in another language group – or religion or culture. But that’s nothing compared to the differences between people and rocks. When you put rocks into it, people are almost exactly alike. Rocks are really different from people! [Laughter.] But then if you put all the people and all the rocks that exist in one category, compared to the things that don’t exist, they’re really different! I mean, what could be more different than something that is from something that is not? Right?” Think about it!
Therefore, everything that is, is very much the same. Quite connected. Quite intimate. We’re all cousins. We’re cousins with rocks and clouds. And so that’s what he’s saying here. Because we are – we are absolutely intimate with and connected with everything. And it’s personal. That’s why he says at the end that it’s your time-being. The intimacy of things is very personal and friendly to ourselves. It’s right at the heart of what we are.
Norman’s first on talk on Dogen’s “Uji” or “Time Being” from his classical work “Shobogenzo”. Norman uses three translations in discussing this important work on Time: 1) “Moon in a Dewdrop” by Kazuaki Tanahashi 2)”Shobogenzo Zen Essay’s by Dogen” by Thomas Cleary 3)Shasta Abbey Shobogenzo translation on line http://www.shastaabbey.org/1dogen/intro.pdf.
Dogen’s Time Being (Uji) 1
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | August 19, 2009
Transcribed and edited by Ryūsen Barbara Byrum
We’re reading Uji, which is most often translated as “The Time-Being.” It is a fascicle of Dogen’s from Shobogenzo, his great work. The main translation we’re using is the one in the book Moon in a Dewdrop – Writings of Zen Master Dogen, edited by Kaz Tanahashi.
This is a particularly unique and important writing by Dogen, because very few religious writers write specifically on the subject of time. It’s unusual that someone would take up the question of time as a religious matter, and so this essay of Dogen’s is well-known. Also, it just so happens that it has exactly the same title as a work by Martin Heidegger called Sein und Zeit (Being and Time.) This is Heidegger’s great work, and since Heidegger is probably the most seminal Western philosopher in the second half of the twentieth century, the fact that Heidegger says in many ways the same things that Dogen is saying is really noteworthy and interesting to a lot of philosophers, writers, and scholars.
We’ll read the text a little bit, and I will make some comments. Dogen is quoting here, I think, from Yaoshan, who says:
“For the time being stand on top of the highest peak.
For the time being stand on the bottom of the deepest ocean.
For the time being three heads and eight arms. [Which means a fighting demon and thus an agitated, angry mind.]
For the time being an eight – or sixteen-foot body. [That means Buddha. These are opposites: highest peak – deepest ocean. Fighting demon – Buddha.]
For the time being a staff or a whisk. [These are symbols of the Zen teacher – the realized Zen teacher who has a staff and a whisk.]
For the time being a pillow or a lantern. [These are objects that signify a monastic – the striving and struggling to be realized. Again, a set of opposites.]
For the time being the sons of Zhang and Li. [Meaning your average Joe – “Joe the Plumber.”]
For the time being, the whole earth and the whole sky.”
Last week we noted something interesting. Typically the Japanese word “uji,” which can mean “for the time being” or “at that time,” can also be translated in different ways according to the context. Often in Zen stories you will see the word “uji” in the part of the story where it will say that so-and-so became enlightened. For example, “At that time (uji), he became awakened.” Dogen’s point is that when you read the story, the phrase “at that time” is a throw-away. Who notices those words of the story? You notice the dialogue and the enlightenment. You don’t focus on the phrase “at that time.” Dogen says that the whole thing is about “at that time.” The pivot of the story is not what these guys are saying. The pivot of the story is “at that time.”
Similarly, I think Yaoshan is very innocently saying, “For the time being.” Dogen is now going to write a whole essay on the part that says “for the time being,” which I think Yaoshan didn’t mean to emphasize in his original writing. So Dogen does this very odd thing. It would be as if you were interpreting a literary text, and you decided that you would do a major book on the words “the” and “an” in Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s profound theme of “the” and “an.” That’s what Dogen is doing here.
“For the time being” here means time itself is being, and all being is time. A golden sixteen-foot body is time; because it is time, there is the radiant illumination of time.
So, this is a beautiful thought. It comes from a sutra that says, “There is not a place anywhere in the cosmos – an actual place – that the Buddha, in his many, infinite lifetimes of the past, has not practiced.” In other words, right there where Jack is sitting, at a previous time, a Buddha literally sat there and practiced meditation. And the same thing where Mary Ann is sitting. In the Avatamsaka Sutra it is not that the Buddha was in the past, but is in the present moment. If you actually had a microscope strong enough to see what was going on in the molecules of the present, you would see that on every atom of space, in this moment, there’s a little buddha sitting on top of the atom. The buddha has a whole retinue of disciples and he’s giving a dharma talk to the disciples. This whole thing is there on every atom of space, everywhere.
That is what he is saying here. Time is illuminated by the presence of awakening. It’s funny to make these little visualizations, but what they amount to is this profound thought that time and space are illuminated – the way that I would put it nowadays – by love. Think of that. Time and space are actually illuminated at all points by love. We are missing it, of course, because we are so burdened by all of our problems, but it is actually so.
Study it as the twenty-four hours of the present.
In other words, study the twenty-four hours of your day. Study them. Look for the illumination in every moment.
“Three heads and eight arms” is time;
This is astonishing, because we get it that Buddha is time. That sounds nice. But our angry, confused mind is also time, and, therefore, it is also illuminated.
because it is time, it is not separate from the twenty-four hours of the present.
So I’m going to share with you an exercise that I really encourage you to take up. This would be a great thing. Take any two sections – maybe one we’ve gone over or one we haven’t gone over – and give your own interpretative translation of it. Free translation. Following along the sentences, but doing it in a way that is actually what you understand from the text. So that is what I’ve done with section 2 and section 3 of the Kaz translation, and I’ll share those with you:
First, Dogen’s words for section 2,
Even though you do not measure the hours of the day as long or short, far or near, you still call it twelve hours [which means twenty-four hours, because the Japanese way of telling time is every hour is two hours. It means twenty-four hours of the day]. Because the signs of time’s coming and going are obvious, people do not doubt it. Although they do not doubt it, they do not understand it. Or when sentient beings doubt what they do not understand, their doubt is not firmly fixed. Because of that, their past doubts do not necessarily coincide with the present doubt. Yet doubt itself is nothing but time.
I think it’s hard to understand what is being said here. If you are a translator, and you’re really trying to stick to the text and not add extra words and explanations, something that may be clear or understood in the original would not be clear or understood in the translation. But then you feel constrained not to make it clear if that means adding all kinds of things. See what I mean? In a way, I think it is hard to grasp the meaning of this section, because Kaz is being faithful to the original, but maybe if you were a Japanese 13th century speaker, you would understand.
So now in my version I’m adding more words. It’s not a translation. It’s an interpretation. So here’s what it says: “Although we may not have actually measured the twenty-four hours of the day to see how long or short they really are…” Which is true. Who has sat down and actually measured time other than with a watch? How would you measure it? “Although we may not have actually measured the twenty-four hours of the day to see how long or short they really are, still we call them twenty-four hours, and we’re confident of their length. The traces of time, having come and gone, are clear.” A picture of you twenty years ago is different from a picture of you today, so we conclude that time has passed, because there are reasons to believe so. “The traces of time, having come and gone, are clear, so people do not doubt that these twenty-four hours have actually occurred.” So, although we haven’t verified the amount of time, we still figure that time really did pass. “But, even though people commonly have no doubt about time having occurred, they cannot know for certain that the past did occur, because it is now past and therefore cannot be concretely verified.” We assume that the past happened, but it’s passed – it’s gone – so there is no way to concretely verify that it happened. In other words, there is a lot here to be doubtful about, but we do not doubt any of it. We take it completely for granted, even though when you think about it for even a minute, there are a lot of doubtful things – about the passing of time, the amount of time.
“So though people commonly have doubts about things that they can’t be entirely sure of, in fact, they can’t even tell whether a doubt that they had in the past, or even a doubt that they had a moment ago, is the same as the doubt that they have now. And so, they should be doubtful about their doubting – not as certain of it as they so often seem to be. Doubt is doubt for the time being. Nothing more. Doubt itself is time.”
So, in effect, Dogen is – in a very skillful and logical way – pointing out that we should all be very doubtful about the passing of the day. We don’t know whether or not it really occurred, and so now we become doubtful. Then he says that even though we become doubtful, we can’t even be sure of our doubtfulness, because time is passing while you are doubting. A doubt of a moment ago may not be the same as a doubt of this moment. So all we know is that life is time. Our assumptions are probably wrong, and even our doubts about our assumptions are probably wrong.
In section 3 Dogen says:
The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time.
Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another. The way-seeking mind arises in this moment. A way-seeking moment arises in this mind. It is the same with practice and with attaining the way.
Thus the self setting itself out in array sees itself. This is the understanding that the self is time.
I think, again, that we have the same problem. In a way, we can understand the words, but the significance escapes us, I think, because of the trueness of the translation. So here is my interpretive version of that same section:
“What do we mean by me, myself? Ultimately, if we contemplate this far enough, my self, my body, my position in space, and all that is involved with it, is all-inclusive. The whole world of location is involved – each and every place and thing.” If you really think about, ‘What is me? What is my self? Where do I end?’ I think that’s where you end up. You end up realizing that the self is all-inclusive, and each and every place and thing – being as it is– is time. So the self is actually all of space and time.”
“Although it seems that things cannot occupy the same space, and so must hinder one another each vying for its space…” As in the game “musical chairs,” which is based on that idea. When the music stops, somebody doesn’t have a chair, because somebody else is sitting in it. And our whole lives are based on that. I have to get enough money, because if so-and-so gets it all, then I won’t have any. I have to get enough love, because if so-and-so gets it all, then I won’t get any. Our whole sense of the way we live is based on the fact that things hinder one another, and so we all have to stand up and get what we need, right? “Although it seems that things cannot occupy the same time and space, and so must hinder one another – each vying for its space, in fact, things, as being, do not ever hinder another, just as time moves freely without hindrance.” So time flows on. There is no problem. Does yesterday get mixed up and become today? It doesn’t happen. You don’t wake up one morning, and all of a sudden it is five years later – except in a movie, maybe. Time has a way of flowing freely without any hindrance.
Well, he says, it’s the same with everything else – things too. So then love arises as time, because that’s what way-seeking mind means. Way-seeking mind means bodhicitta. We’ve had many long discussions and months and months of seminar on bodhicitta – which is compassion and love. Way-seeking mind, which he mentions here, is love. He doesn’t use that word, but that’s how I interpret it. “So you see how the arising of things, without hindrance, flowing together, without any problems, mutually supporting everything – what is that but love? Love arises as time, and time arises as love. In the same way, ongoing effort and practice, and the joy and release of full, culminated practice, arise as functions of one another and support one another.”
This is one of Dogen’s most important ideas and one of his most profound religious thoughts – that one moment of practice is one moment of awakening. Full awakening is there in every moment of time. Buddha is in every moment, so in every moment of your practice is the full culmination of the whole of practice. Enlightenment supports your effort every moment, and your effort every moment supports enlightenment.
“And so, each of us arrays ourselves as the world. When we see the world, we see ourselves. When we fully enter time, we see that we and the world are nothing but time. Nothing but love.”
Second in a two part series of the History of Precepts.
History of Precepts 2
By Norman Fischer | April 22, 2009
Transcribed, abridged, and edited by Murray McGillivray and Barbara Byrum
So, we are continuing with thinking about the precepts, about conduct in this world, about how we live, what we do, and how we understand what we do. The more you think about this question, the deeper it gets.
Last time I spoke here, I spoke about morality in the Western tradition. I talked about our traditions of Judaism and Christianity and the effects of those traditions on our moral conduct, and I compared that to Buddhism. It seems that in Western thought there's a big difference between metaphysics and ethics. In other words, there's a big difference between the ultimate truth and conduct – which seems a more practical, everyday matter, and different from pursuit of truth. In our Western thought there's a bias in favor of metaphysics, because searching for the truth seems like a much more profound thing than everyday ethics. So metaphysics gives us philosophy and mysticism and mystery and art and intuition, and ethics just seems like probity and goodness and common sense, as with moral or legal codes. We all know we need that, but it seems less important, less meaty.
When I was young it sure seemed that way to me, and since in the beginning of the Buddhist movement in those days most of the practitioners were young, and since anybody young or old who took up Asian forms of thought was somehow automatically in revolt against Western conformity, there was almost no interest at all in discussions of ethics. Not at all. It was all about meditation. So now, forty years went by in the blink of an eye, and here I am talking about ethics. I'm all the time thinking about it and concerned about it, which maybe attests to the fact that I and the rest of us are getting old and boring and less interesting – or maybe we're just growing up!
But also, in the intervening years there's been a lot of important thought that is questioning whether or not it really makes sense to have this big split between metaphysics and ethics. A lot of the thinkers that I've been interested in reading about in these last five or ten years – people like Buber, Levinas, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, some of the most important thinkers of the late twentieth century – have criticized the notion that there's some metaphysical truth outside of the actual facts of our daily living, outside of our interactions and our conduct. That sounds like Dogen's understanding and Buddhism's understanding, that there is no essential truth and no essential self who could discover that truth. There are simply the arising and passing away of empty phenomena in radical mutual interrelation. This in Buddhism is the teaching of pratityasamutpada, usually translated into English as "conditioned coproduction": everything arises together and passes away together; everything influences everything else; there is no separate anything; there's just the phenomena of existence moment after moment. And this, according to Nagarjuna the great philosopher of emptiness, is what emptiness is. Things are empty exactly because they arise together and pass away together, and they have no real separateness.
So according to this way of looking at things, you don't have some primary truth and then ethics comes later. Conduct is truth, and truth is conduct. There's no difference whatsoever between the two. I think that Dogen and Buddhism and all these important thinkers agree on this point, and make many differences the same or bring them together.
I'm saying all of this just to get to where I left off last time. I was talking about ethics in Western thought and all the terrible problems with guilt and tortured conscience and self-denigration that comes from being commanded to be good by an absolutely good deity – when maybe we think we're not so good. I was contrasting all of that with Buddhist ethics, which seems refreshingly to be not about commandment or goodness or badness, but simply practical. That liberation and freedom from suffering just seem empirically to require ethics as part of the path. So ethics in Buddhism is not a matter of being a good person or not being a good person. It's just a matter of practice. It's a matter of making an effort for the purpose of our own liberation and happiness, and that that effort requires good ethical conduct. Although in Buddhism you have the practice of confession, and there's the encouragement of remorse for harm caused by actions that are harmful, there is no concept of, and no need for, what we would call guilt or repression.
With the sixteen bodhisattva precepts of Dogen, and with Dogen's understanding of those precepts, we arrive at the unity of truth and ethics. Dogen starts with the traditional Buddhist understanding of ethics as training, but then adds to that the idea that precepts are truth, not just conduct. They're the whole of the truth. The precepts in Zen are said not only to describe the conduct of buddhas, the conduct that we would aspire to and that we would spontaneously exhibit if we were buddhas, it says that the precepts are buddhas. The precepts are the Buddha-nature that inheres in all of us and in life. So it's as if the precepts are some kind of expression of the essence of life itself.
Some of you might know that last month I was very busy doing four dharma transmission ceremonies for priests that I ordained at Zen Center maybe ten years ago or so. These ceremonies are very intense and take a lot of effort, and they confirm within their structure the most intimate insights of our tradition. And they're all about the precepts. All about the precepts, and about the lineage of buddhas whose sole purpose is to transmit the precepts for the purpose of lighting up this world, for the purpose of compassion. And then, just the other day, last Sunday, we had a wonderful jukai ceremony. Three people received the precepts last Sunday. In the ceremony, if you were there, you heard them say, "Even after acquiring Buddha-hood I will continuously follow the path of the precepts." In going through the ritual, it's said that they become, through the agency of the ritual, "Children of Buddha." They become family members of Buddha. In the ceremony, as some of you saw, they receive a document which is called in Japanese "kechimyaku," that means "blood-vein."
It may seem strange that when you get this piece of paper, it actually says "blood-vein." The precepts are understood to be the blood that flows through the veins of the buddhas, the life-blood of the buddhas, the life-blood of consciousness itself. This is how Dogen understands the precepts and that's the kind of understanding of the precepts that we enact in the ritual. Dogen has a lot of sayings about the precepts, and there are some Shobogenzo fascicles, and so on. Of course he says in many places that obviously we should follow the precepts: that we should actually not lie, we should actually not steal, we should actually not kill, and so on and so forth, but he also says that the meaning and the power of the precepts goes way beyond this.
Believe it or not, there were times in old Japan when people believed that following the precepts as ethical rules was a trivial matter. It wasn't important, and the point was not to follow the precepts and carry them out, the point was to receive and embrace the precepts in the ritual. If you received and embraced the precepts in the empowered ritual, then there was a power that transcended and was beyond the details of your conduct. This sounds strange to us with our modern materialistic point of view, but it was not unusual in medieval Japan for priests with lots of spiritual power to give precepts to ghosts, spirits, demons, plants, and animals. If a village was being terrorized by a demon, the priest would come in and give the demon the precepts and thereby subdue the demon. Then after that everything would be fine, and the village would be peaceful again. Sometimes they would offer precepts as a way to prevent war. This may seem strange, but this is how they were viewed.
In Taking Our Places I wrote about three levels of understanding the precepts. The literal level is when "don't kill" literally means "don't kill," and "don't steal" literally means "don't steal" – all in the conventional sense of the words. The compassionate level is the level in which you might violate the literal level for a compassionate reason. Jeff [Bickner] gave an example last week of what I said a long time ago, "When somebody comes to your door in Nazi Germany and says ‘Are there any Jews in the house?' and you have twenty-five Jews the back room, you say, ‘No, there aren't any Jews in the house.'" That's what you have to do to follow the compassionate precept. There's no sense that you're breaking a precept there. It's not a violation of the precepts because it's very clearly for compassionate reasons.
So there is the literal level, the compassionate level, and the ultimate level. Here's what I wrote about the ultimate level in the book:
The third level of precept practice is the ultimate level. Through our spiritual endeavors, meditation, prayer, contemplation, we try to penetrate to this level, until we come to appreciate that the precepts are deeper than we have ever imagined, so deep that they can never be completely understood. We come to see that our ordinary mundane choices and actions are really much more than they seem, reverberating beyond anything we had imagined. On the ultimate level, we appreciate that precepts are beyond breaking and not breaking, distinctions we now see as products of our limited conceptualizing minds. Like the precepts, ultimately we and the world cannot be violated, for we are complete and perfect as we are. At the same time, we and the world are tragically limited. Things will always be a little off and our conduct will always fall short. On this ultimate and paradoxical level, it doesn't even make sense to utter the word "precept," or the words "good," "bad," "self", or "other." Beyond the dividing narrowness of our limited view, things are connected and complete, and no rules or restraints are required. Appreciating this level, even if only at first intellectually, we know that we don't need to be hard on ourselves or others for breaking precepts or congratulate anyone for keeping them. The only important thing is to go on forever making the effort to practice precepts without measurement or seeking after results.
On the other hand, we also see how easy it would be to use the ultimate level as a cover for our self-deception, justifying our secretly willful, bad conduct with the thought that precepts can never be broken anyway and everything is already perfect, so I can do whatever I want, it doesn't matter. The trap here is all too clear. The truth of the ultimate level notwithstanding, we are forever subject to the practical obligations and effects of our actions.
So these three levels of understanding the precepts are always operating simultaneously, and we practice on all the levels. You could say that the literal level is like early or Pali Buddhism, the compassionate level is like Mahayana Buddhism, and the third level, the ultimate level, is like Zen or tantric practice.
Buddha established the rule of training, the strict Vinaya rules, in which there are 250 or more very specific monastic precepts. Many rules of training are scrupulously followed by lineages to this day – the same exact specific rules are still followed by Theravada monastics.
How did we get from strict precepts to Dogen's sixteen precepts? In Zen the sense is very explicit that the teacher is not the sutra and not the Vinaya, the monastic rule. The teacher is the spirit of the Buddha, the mind and the heart of the Buddha – which is your mind and your heart. So we are to follow that mind and that heart, rather than the letter of the sutra or the letter of the law. This is very clearly stated in Zen, so it's quite a different attitude. Nevertheless, despite this Zen attitude, the strict Vinaya rule was followed everywhere in the Buddhist world for many, many hundreds of years, including in China, where Zen first developed. We read a few months ago the Sixth Ancestor's Sutra in which he seems to be reinterpreting the precepts to the ultimate level. Nevertheless, he and the entire Chinese Buddhist establishment practiced and transmitted the entire Vinaya Rule. But Buddhism in China was mostly Mahayana Buddhism, the foundation of which is compassion and the emptiness teachings. There was a growing sense among the Chinese community that something more was needed-another sense of precepts that expressed the importance of compassion and social virtue, because the Vinaya rules, when you analyze them and look at them, are really rather individualistic, and even to some extent anti-social. From the point of view of the Vinaya rules, interactions with others are only important insofar as they affect your consciousness and your personal liberation.
In a way, you could read the Vinaya as antisocial rules, so this was uncomfortable for the Chinese Buddhist community. So around the fifth century, all of a sudden there appeared a sutra called the Brahmajalasutra, the Fon Long Jing in Chinese, and translated as the "Brahma's Net Sutra." It was clearly a Mahayana sutra. It had celestial bodhisattvas and extravagant poetic language and miracles, just like all the other Mahayana sutras. It was claimed to be a translation from the Pali or the Sanskrit, but almost all scholars agree that this was actually written in Chinese-it was basically a fake sutra, as many sutras are. It doesn't mean that they're not read and practiced and taken seriously, but according to critical scholarship it was not actually written in Sanskrit. This sutra contains fifty-eight precepts: ten major precepts, which are similar to but not exactly the same as the grave precepts in Zen, and forty-eight minor precepts. And interestingly, unlike the Vinaya precepts, these are not monastic precepts. They're not meant just for monastics; they were meant to be practiced by both monastics and lay practitioners, which is very much in the Mahayana spirit, which by definition-you know, Mahayana means "Great Vehicle"-is a much more inclusive form of practice than the earlier vehicle. It softens the traditional Buddhist very heavy preference for monastic practice over lay practice.
In traditional Buddhism, lay people basically give alms and hope for a better rebirth, and monastics can be liberated. There are exceptions, there are examples of liberated lay people, but basically it's unusual. You have to be a monastic to be liberated. The Mahayana does away with that way of looking at things and sees lay and monastic practitioners on a much more equal footing. The Brahmajalasutra is for both lay and monastic practitioners, and eventually in China monks, when they were ordained, began to receive both sets of precepts. Sometimes they would have an ordination ceremony in which they would receive 253 precepts, and then the next day they might be joined by lay practitioners, and all together they would take the 58 precepts of the Brahmajalasutra. So now they had, in a sense, a double tradition of ordination.
Meanwhile, in addition to all that, the Chinese established another form of precepts – the tradition of monastic rule. The Vinaya rule is not really for monastics living in monasteries; it's for monastics wherever they are, because in early Buddhism there weren't monasteries. Monks were wanderers and wandered around from village to village and didn't live in monasteries. But in China monks did live in monasteries, so now side by side with the Vinaya Rule and the Mahayana precepts, there were in China fairly elaborate monastic regulations, which were more like house rules, and were never taken ritually in ceremonies. It was just understood that you entered the monastery, and you followed the rules. They were actually conceived of as the analogue of secular laws. Monasteries were considered like an alternate reality with its own set of rules and laws, and monks could not be prosecuted by secular authorities. If they broke rules, they had their own system of justice.
Now in Japan one of the early founders of the Tendai School, Saitcho, established in the eighth century an independent ordination platform in which only the fifty-eight precepts were used, not the monastic precepts. This seems like a really radical step, but maybe not so much as you think, because in Japan they never did establish the Vinaya ordination nearly as strongly as they had in China, India, and in other Buddhist countries. So it wasn't that hard for Saitcho to change the ordination in this radical way. Dogen, who was a Tendai monk in the thirteenth century, was ordained with the fifty-eight precepts. He probably never did receive Vinaya precepts, although he lived a strict religious life, because he always lived in monasteries, and he followed the monastic rule, even though he didn't ritually take those rules.
So now we have fifty-eight precepts – ten plus forty-eight. How do we get from fifty-eight to sixteen? It seems like these precepts, the sixteen bodhisattva precepts that we study and follow, which include the three refuges and the three pure precepts, as well as the ten grave precepts, are unique to Zen, and probably were created by Dogen himself. That is, all of the sixteen precepts existed before, and Dogen didn't make them up, but they were packaged in this particular way. He added the three refuges, which were never before considered to be precepts, and he added the three pure precepts, which are a very, very ancient ethical formulation in Buddhism, and then he changed the ten precepts of the Brahmajalasutra according to other formulations that pre-existed. So his list of ten is slightly different, but he didn't make them up; he got them from other sources.
For Dogen, I think, it was very clear that lifestyle precepts, specific rules, mattered a great deal, but they were not religious commitments. You would follow them because they were important, and they were training rules, and you were committed to them if you lived in a monastic community. This was so completely understood that it didn't even need to be mentioned, and you didn't need a ritual to receive and follow these rules. On the other hand, the sixteen bodhisattva precepts were completely understood as religious commitments, and they were only operative when they were received in an empowered ritual carried out by a qualified clergy who's empowered to give the ritual. Dogen understood the sixteen precepts mainly on the ultimate level, mainly as the Buddha's very life, the ultimate expression of Dharma. He saw them, as I was saying earlier, as unspeakably deep, as almost unknowable.
When you think about it, one of Dogen's main religious insights is that practice and realization are not two different things as we would think, one being the culmination, and the other the method to get to the culmination. One is the end and the other is the means. No, he didn't think that way at all. Practice-realization for him was one word. Every moment of practice was a moment of realization. The only realization was through practice, and this was one continuously, eternally unfolding process. And so you can see how in such a process precepts would become central. They would become crucially important, because they would express this process. Its essence, its rule, and its fruition are expressed in the sixteen bodhisattva precepts. So you could see how Dogen's view of precepts is integral to his whole concept of practice.
First of two part series on the History of Precepts. Norman first gave this talk at the Dharma Seminar on April 1, but the recording did not take. This talk was given at teh Brooklyn Zen Center on April 15th.
History of Precepts 1
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | April 15, 2009
Location: Brooklyn Zen Center, Brooklyn, NY
Transcribed, abridged, and edited by Murray McGillivray and Barbara Byrum
Well, it's nice to be here, again. I love this spot, a great place and a great community, and I've heard that lately you've been studying precepts. There's been a precepts study group, and many of you are interested in really examining Zen and Buddhist ethics. In fact, at home in my Dharma Seminar that meets in California, we've also been embarking on a study of the precepts, and so I wanted to give you the first talk that I gave in that seminar.
So now let's think about ethics and morality from the standpoint of Buddhism. I'm going to make some big statements that are debatable, but I think, in general, probably fair statements. Let's say that in Buddhism there is the assumption that human beings are both naturally good and bad. In other words, there's the assumption that we are potentially capable of beautiful, ethical conduct, of completely natural human dignity, of tremendous acts of kindness and love, but that there's definitely a tendency in us towards confusion, which twists our highest capabilities and all too often turns them sour.
One of my favorite quotations from early Buddhist sutras is in one of the collections of the Pali canon, and this quotation is echoed in many of the Mahayana sutras. In the Pali canon the Buddha says something like this to the disciples, "This mind (or "this heart," because it's the same word in Asian languages), oh monks, is luminous, only it is defiled by adventitious defilements from outside." This little passage, which is the beginning of about a one page little sutra, is the germ of the whole Mahayana Buddhist idea of Buddha-nature, or natural or inherent awakening. What it's saying is that the nature of the heart of the human being, of the soul, of our consciousness is luminous, which is to say its nature is light, literally, and also figuratively light, and joyful and happy and good. That's its nature, but "adventitious defilements from outside" of it have messed it up and covered it over. In effect, that's what it's saying: things from the outside have come and covered it up, so that its light may not be apparent, even though it's there. And that's why there's a path. That's why spiritual cultivation is a necessity, so that little by little through cultivation you can remove these defilements, allowing the light that's already there to shine through.
Now of course we would right away ask, "Well, where do these outside defilements come from, and where do they start? How come they were there in the beginning? Who's at fault here? Let's get a lawyer, who's at fault? Where did it come from? How did it happen in the first place?" And Buddhism's actual answer is, "We don't know, or, it didn't come from anywhere in the first place, because there is no first place. These adventitious defilements from without don't have a beginning. There literally is no beginning." When the question is asked, "There is no beginning" is the answer. There is an ending, however, and the ending is called nirvana: peace, ease, and the light shining forth.
Morality, in Buddhism, is not a matter of guilt and sin. There is no concept equivalent to guilt and sin, because there is no God to require this of us. It is more of a practical matter of cleaning up our act, so that there will be less suffering and less misery for ourselves and for those around us. Because if you've noticed, when human beings are miserable and suffering, they have a way of letting others know about it and spreading that around. So it really would be impractical for me to be peaceful and happy without any concern for the happiness and peace of those around me, because I could never be peaceful and happy if everybody around me is miserable and taking it out on me. There would be no way I could really be peaceful and happy. So morality here is a matter of bringing happiness to our lives. It's actually a practical necessity to reduce suffering and misery.
The assumption is made in Buddhism that we're fundamentally whole and good, that reality itself is by its nature whole and good, and that due to a beginning-less adventitious screw-up – that's nobody's fault but seems to be built into the nature of things – we have strayed from this wholeness and goodness, and because of this, we're unhappy, and we're sick. The purpose of the path of religious practice is to bring us back to health and to wholeness. And it's often remarked that the Buddhist teaching is compared to a doctor's diagnosis and cure, because that's the sense of it – it's for health and wholeness.
Classical Buddhism says that practice consists in three studies or three parts. One part is meditation, one part is ethics or morality, and one part is wisdom. These three studies are like the three legs of a tripod, that all need to be developed equally in order for the vessel to stand with stability. Morality calms and clears the mind from the agitation that comes with shoddy conduct.
This seems to be empirically true, that when you break laws and engage in bad conduct, it makes you nervous. Now you may be very good at handling that nervousness and even channeling the anxiety and the energy. But it is anxiety and it is nervousness, and if you had the chance to look within yourself , you would see that. So that's why morality and ethical conduct is a sort of basis for meditation practice – to calm and clear the mind. Then you can meditate. Meditation deepens and enriches a mind that has a baseline of calmness and clarity, and that mind, deepened and enriched by meditation practice, can really appreciate and really touch its own luminous nature. Maybe that's /////what enlightenment is in Buddhism, is a mind enriched by meditation that can really appreciate its luminous nature, so that there can really be a sense of self-regard and wholeness, not because one believes it, but because one has touched it on one's cushion. Then, based on that sense of the mind's nature, wisdom will cognize, express, and put into action the beauty of that nature. So those are the practices in Buddhism and how morality fits into them. So it's a much more straightforward matter, at least as it appears to us now in our culture, coming from elsewhere. There's suffering, we all, I think, appreciate this. Suffering is not a small, marginal fact of life, it seems to be a fairly central fact. And naturally, we all want to reduce or end suffering for ourselves and others, and so there's a path in which suffering can be reduced and ended, and in that path morality is an absolutely necessary component. So there's no angst here, there's no struggle, there's no need to repress because we understand our suffering and we want to reduce it–that's what we want! So we don't really have to squelch our desire, because our desire, in the end, if we really look within ourselves, is for happiness and peace and we come to understand through our own experience the importance of morality for that. There's no need here for a God to command us–you need a God to command you when you're operating against yourself. You need a force bigger than yourself to frighten you to death so that you won't be doing these bad things that you want to do. Well, we don't have this mechanism in the practice. There's no sense that we are or are not good or bad, there's just the sense of the recognition that a certain kind of conduct will create suffering, a certain kind of conduct will reduce suffering and give us what we need to go deeper and deeper with that reducing and ending of suffering. So morality is simply a part of a program that leads us back to what we are and what we always have been. And there's a sense in Buddhist ethical practice that no one will be perfectly ethical at all times, in other words, human imperfection is a given and an assumption. We don't expect otherwise. But if we're clear about the goal and we will continue to make our best efforts toward it with a good spirit and good expectations, then we'll be successful, however much we can be.
So this is precepts, morality and ethical conduct as early Buddhism saw it. Then it's another story to get from there to the sixteen bodhisattva precepts in Zen, which have a whole other dimension that I haven't mentioned and I won't mention now because that would take too long but in another talk, sometime, elsewhere, I'll mention it. But don't worry, it'll be on the Internet, so you can hear Part Two.
But I have a few footnotes, because since I wrote this talk and first gave it I noticed a few things. Apparently people are thinking, nowadays, about ethics and morality, and there's a lot of thought about it. So maybe you saw, a couple days ago, or last week, David Brooks's column on this subject (sometimes I read David Brooks in the Times, online and he had a column about this). I don't remember exactly what it said, but what I got out of it was that he's talking about new work on morality that compares the long history of philosophical discussion about morality with the simple feeling, the human feeling of doing good. And Brooks doesn't reference Buddhism in his column and I doubt that he's a Buddhist, but he doesn't have to be because contemporary psychology has been so influenced by Buddhism that sometimes it's hard to tell where Buddhism comes into it and where it's just there, you know: crypto-Buddhism.
But this is very much like what I'm saying. There's no doubt that the positive feeling of doing good, and the nervous actual self-harming feeling of not doing good, of doing bad, these things are actually really palpable. If you have access to yourself, and this is the thing about people who do bad actions a lot, they almost invariably have very little access to their inner lives and don't feel–in fact they have pain that they're not aware of often, and therefore out of that pain they're acting in self-destructive ways, right? I mean this is why, we now understand, to a great extent people do bad conduct. And this is reported over and over again by people who work in prisons. Meditation teachers who work in prison are tremendously gratified by the work because they find out that when prisoners are given through meditation practice access to their hearts, they begin to see their inner condition and they begin to be dismayed by what they have done and they begin to heal and they begin to really turn around. Once they have access to what's inside they begin to notice that they've been addicted to a bad feeling, the way you can be addicted to a drug that is harming you. So that these are actual feelings, human feelings of doing good or doing bad. So although Nietzsche might have been wrong, his whole thing about the will to power and so on, he really was expressing something that he felt and saw, that was accurate in the society around him, the power of repression and the amount of force needed to overcome repression, to really give us the permission to look inside and see what's really going on. So anyway, you can look up that David Brooks column, I though it was interesting.
Also, last footnote and then I'm finished, I was also listening to the radio the other day, and there was a Harvard psychologist on the Terry Gross show speaking about child rearing, and we just had a grandchild so I'm interested in child rearing again after many years. So he said something that struck me. He was complaining about the current fad in child rearing for self-esteem. He was saying that every child is constantly being praised and encouraged for everything that that child does: throw the ball far? Great! Drop it? Great! Whatever you do, praise should always be administered because a child needs self-esteem. And he said this is a bad idea, because not everything that a child does is necessarily praiseworthy, and children are smart and they understand that half the praise or 90% of it is fake anyway, and you end up with less self-esteem rather than more when you think that the basis of self-esteem is performance, so you should always be praised on your performance. And he said, why not make virtue the basis of self-esteem? Because virtue, and he used the word virtue which is a very old-fashioned word that nobody ever uses anymore but it really means, literally means in English and in other languages as well, it means the power that we feel inside when we do good, when our actions come from a center where we feel doing good is who we are. And virtue is not a matter of performance, or talent, or acquired skill. It's a human capacity that everyone is capable of. And anybody can manifest virtue beautifully–and suppose that was the basis for self-esteem rather than performance.
So maybe we should be bringing the word "virtue" back into fashion, because a society in which performance, or skill, or appearance, or accomplishment, or comparison one to another is the basis for how we value ourselves, that's a society that is very vulnerable to these old toxic roots that we're trying to overcome. I think we activate those old roots when we base our sense of self-worth and self-esteem on these various performative values. A society in which virtue is emphasized and is the basis for the building of a self and self-esteem is a happy society by comparison. And I think that along with all of our current economic woes and disappointments, it may be that it's not just about the money. It may be that we've invested our whole sense of self and worth in all the things that all this activity represented. And now we're a little bit at a loss. What are we going to do now? Well, maybe this is an answer to that, maybe we need to shift the ground for what we think it means to be a person, what we think makes a person valuable in this world, to oneself and to others.
So, anyway, I wanted to talk to you about that tonight, I've been thinking about it, and while I didn't say it so much in my talk I hope it's obvious to all of you that in our tradition the basis of all of this is not a belief system–I'm not arguing here we should all believe in goodness and virtue, we should all believe that we should be good people–that's not the basis of it. The basis of it is looking within with honesty and understanding your own heart. And that means work on the cushion, meditation practice. There are different ways of approaching this, obviously, but in our tradition that's the way that we approach it–with a minimum of theology and ideology and really privileging the experience that we have, coming back over and over again, over time, with intensity, to the cushion. So if this makes sense to you and you're thinking to yourself, "I would like to make some shift now in the way I am living my life and viewing my life," I think the most powerful thing you can do is establish a meditation practice. The purpose, I think, of a place like this is to support that practice, but most of us in reality probably do it at home regularly because maybe its . . . in New York, every place is very hard to get to–I've found this out. If you want to go anywhere it's, like, very hard. So it's probably hard to come here. So you can't come every day, twice a day or something like that, but you can come with some regularity and you can also meditate at home. And meditation practice exists in a context so there's some teachings, some community, some encouragement, because it's not just like a scientific thing like a pill, take this, call me in the morning, it's a culture.
Second Talk in series on Training the Mind based on Atisha’s Seven Points of Mind Training, a famous teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. Norman refers to both Pema Chodron’s book “Start Where You Are”, and Chogyam Trungpa’s book “Training the Mind”.
Fourth talk in a series on Training the Mind based on Atisha’s Seven Points of Mind Training, a famous teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. Norman refers to both Pema Chodron’s book “Start Where You Are”, and Chogyam Trungpa’s book “Training the Mind”.
Third talk in a series on Training the Mind based on Atisha’s Seven Points of Mind Training, a famous teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. Norman refers to both Pema Chodron’s book “Start Where You Are”, and chogyam Trungpa’s “Training the Mind”.
First Talk in series on Training the Mind based on Atisha’s Seven Points of Mind Training, a famous teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. Norman refers to bothPema Chodron’s book “Start Where You Are”, kand Chogyam Trungpa’s book “Training the Mind”.
Meditation instruction for series on Training the Mind based on Atisha’s Seven Points of Mind Training, a famous teaching of Tibetan Buddhism. In this series Norman refers to both Pema Choldron’s “Start Where You Are”, and Chogyam Trungpa’s “Training the Mind”.
Third and last in the series on the Heart Sutra. Due to recording error, last week’s recording did not take.
This talk includes both the second talk on the Heart Sutra and a Eulogy for Zen Rabbi Alan Lew, Norman’s close friend and spiritual companion of over 40 years.
First talk in this 2009 series of talks on the Heart Sutra.
Shuso Chris Fortin talks on Dogen’s “Dragon Song” as found in “Beyond Thinking” by Kazuaki Tanahashi.
Zen Women: Beyond Tea Ladies, Iron Maidens, and Macho Masters
Wisdom Publications 2009-10-27
ISBN 086171475X
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Biographies and stories of Zen women in China, Korea, and Japan, with commentary by Grace Schireson. An important collection of our current knowledge of historical Zen women.
Dogen on Practice Period as found in “Beyond Thinking” by Kazuaki Tanahashi.
Dogen on Truth Part 2 – Third talk of St. Dorothy’s Sesshin 2008. This talk os based on Dogen’s writing of “Dotoku” or “Expressing the Truth” as found in the Shobogenzo, Nishijima and Cross 3 volume translation.
Dogen on Truth Part (2 of 2)
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | October 21, 2008
Abridged and edited by Rysuen Barbara Byrum
Life is so unspeakably complex and elegant and so radically simple, and language and thought are such blunt instruments. Language and thought are so unspeakably complex and elegant, and so radically simple – if we only could only appreciate them and set them in their proper balance. Skin, flesh, bones, and marrow – everything is deep beyond depth, and everything is right here on the surface. Right in front of our noses, every single day, ultimate reality is unfolding itself. We don't have to go very far to look.
In these few days of sesshin we've been trying to appreciate Dogen's teachings – trying to understand what Dogen is telling us. And about now I'm wondering if we have understood anything at all. Or, if we are, what is it that we are understanding? Or is understanding actually possible? Do we even know what we mean by understanding in the first place? These are the things that I am wondering about these days.
Maybe to understand is actually a feeling of understanding. Maybe that's what understanding is – a feeling of understanding. And what do we understand? Maybe we don't know anything! Probably that's right. Probably we don't understand anything. Nothing at all. But it is undeniable that we feel a sense of understanding. And we feel a sense of having being understood. Understanding and having been understood. We would be foolish to think that we could verify that we understood anything at all. Or maybe we have understood plenty of things, and they're all wrong. But actually that wouldn't really matter, because the feeling of understanding, the feeling of being sheltered, the feeling of being understood and appreciated, is unmistakable, and there is no denying this. This is of the nature of certainty – that we feel understanding.
It would probably be good to imagine that we're not actually understanding a word of Dogen at all. And, really, how could we possibly think that we could understand Dogen, over this unspeakable abyss of eight or nine centuries? In a whole world of culture and language, how could we possibly understand what Dogen felt and what he meant by what he wrote?
James is reading Hee-jin Kim's great book on Dogen, Eihei Dogen: Mystical Realist, and he was quoting for me a passage from Kim, interpreting Dogen and the idea of meaninglessness. I think that's exactly right. Part of what Dogen wants to communicate to us is the meaninglessness of meaning. Meaning, if it really matters at all, must also be beyond meaning – just as we learned yesterday, to our astonishment, that expressing the truth absolutely requires nonexpression of the truth. And as we were also discussing yesterday, real speaking requires the ability to be silent, and true doing requires the ability to non-do.
Sometimes in his writings, Dogen dismantles the truth. He purposely takes it apart. The human truth, the Zen truth, the Buddhist truth – he reduces it, basically, to a pile of indecipherable words, on purpose. Every now and then we experience this as we read him. That makes us realize, as we get through our anger and our frustration and our feelings that we're stupid, how dependent we are on meaning and understanding and knowing. It's shocking to realize how dependent we are on these things. We see that knowing supports our self-clinging and our Frankenstein-like self-consciousness. Knowing strengthens our sense of security, even though we are full of anxiety all the time.
So meaninglessness is the meaning of meaning. It's painful only when we're looking for some two dimensional meaning to hang our hat on. But when we really feel meaning's power to transform us, then we feel meaning's meaninglessness, and we are absolutely inspired by it. Freed by it. And then finally we can relax. We know that there's nothing to worry about, and we can begin to feel our lives deeply and fully – to feel the feeling of our understanding.
So with this in mind, we will go back and read a little bit more of Dōtoku, Expressing the Truth. As we've been discussing in the seminar, we have been learning something about Dogen's technique of using a couple of stories, having a theme, using a couple of Zen stories, and then interpreting them in exactly the way that they were not understood before. He precedes all with a kind of introduction, in which he discusses the theme and sets the tone for the story. So yesterday we went over the introduction, and now we can read the two stories, and then read Dogen's comments on them. So, here's the first story:
Great master Shinsai of Jōshū preaches to the assembly, "If you spend a lifetime not leaving the monastery, sitting in stillness without speaking for ten years or for five years, no one will be able to call you a mute. Afterwards you might be beyond the buddhas."
Those are Jōshū's words. That's the story. Dogen comments:
So when we are "ten years or five years in a monastery," passing through the frosts and flowers again and again, and when we consider the effort spent in pursuit of the truth, that is "a lifetime not leaving the monastery"; the "sitting in stillness," which has cut all interference off by sitting, has been innumerable instances of expressing the truth.
So sitting in a monastery and not saying a word basically for your whole life is "innumerable instances of expressing the truth."
Walking, sitting, and lying down, "without leaving the monastery" may be countless instances of "no one being able to call you a mute." [Meaning constantly speaking. No one will be able to say you haven't been speaking all the time, if you sit for your whole lifetime in a monastery and don't say anything.] But we do not know where "a lifetime" comes from; if we cause that lifetime not to leave the monastery, it will be "not leaving the monastery."
And then there's my favorite line in the whole thing. Dogen says,
But what kind of path through the sky is there between "a lifetime" and "a monastery?"
Isn't that a wonderful thing to say? "What kind of path through the sky is there between a lifetime and a monastery?" I think you appreciate in sesshin that so many things we think we're finding out about ourselves are different in the next moment, and we can't say anymore what's going on. We realize all the time that life is really lived in silence, even when we think we're speaking. Even when we think we're doing something, there's a deep stream of silence flowing underneath. "What kind of path through the sky is there between a lifetime and a monastery?"
Sometimes people ask me, "Wasn't it really a hard transition from living all those years in a semi-monastic life? Without money, without any ordinary things? Wasn't it like a really jarring transition?" And the secret is – and I'll tell you now – the secret is I never actually left the monastery. I've never really been able to see the difference between the monastery and Penn Station at rush hour in New York City. It's pretty much the same thing. Of course, on the surface there is plenty of difference, but when you come down to it, it is pretty much the same thing.
So what kind of path through the sky is there between a lifetime and a monastery?
We should solely intuit and affirm "sitting in stillness." Do not hate "not speaking." "Not speaking" is the expression of the truth, being right from head to tail. "Sitting in stillness" is "a lifetime" or two lifetimes: it is not just one or two periods of zazen. [Every period is a lifetime.] If you experience five years or ten years sitting in silence without speaking, even the buddhas will be unable to think light of you. Truly, even the eyes of Buddha will not be able to glimpse you, and even the power of Buddha will not be able to sway, this sitting in stillness without speaking – because "you will be beyond even the buddhas." Jōshū is saying that it is beyond even the buddhas to describe as "mute" or to describe as "non-mute," that which "sitting in stillness" without speaking expresses.
So, "a lifetime without leaving the monastery" is a lifetime without leaving the expression of the truth. [So, life is expressing the truth, whether we are speaking or not speaking. Expressing the truth is a lifetime without leaving the monastery.] Sitting in stillness without speaking for ten years or five years is the expression of the truth for ten years or for five years; it is a lifetime without leaving nonexpression of the truth; and it is being unable to say anything for ten years or five years. [It's both, as we learned yesterday. Both must be included.] It is sitting away hundred thousands of buddhas. ["What are you doing?" "Oh, I'm sitting a bunch of buddhas away. I'm sitting the buddhas away."] And, it is hundred thousands of buddhas sitting away "you."
When you sit on your cushion, buddhas are sitting you away. And sometimes it feels like that, gradually being worn down by the buddhas, until there's nothing left! Pulverized.
In summary, the buddhas expressing the truth is a lifetime without leaving the monastery. Even mutes [even those who always remain in silence] can have a state of expressing the truth. Do not learn [don't think, in other words] that mutes lack expression of the truth. Those who have expressions of the truth are sometimes no different from mutes.
And here he means people who talk a lot about truth and about dharma might as well be mute. They're just jabbering. They're not saying anything. And the person who says nothing might be expressing the truth more.
You could hear their silent voices, and we can listen to their silent words. How could one who is not silent hope to meet with the silent, or hope to converse with the silent one? Given that they are silent, how are we to meet them, and how are we to converse with them? Learning to practice like this, we should intuit and master the state of silence.
So that's the first story, and the second story is not too long, so I think we have time to do this. The second story is also an unusual story. You're beginning to discern a pattern here, in terms of Dogen's provocatively citing these stories that have to do with saying nothing, as he writes his essay about expressing the truth. So here's the other story.
In the order of Great Master Shinkaku of Seppō there was a monk who went to the edge of the mountain [meaning away from the monastery, far away, because the monasteries are referred to as mountains] and, tying together thatch, built a hut. Years went by, but he did not shave his head. Who can know what vitality there was inside the hut? [Meaning there was a great power in his practice.] Though circumstances in the mountains were desolate indeed. He made himself a wooden dipper, and he would go to the edge of a ravine to scoop water and drink. Truly, he must have been the sort who drinks the ravines.
There's a saying in Zen, "Drinking the whole river in a single gulp," meaning completely turning the whole world, right here where you are. This is high praise for the hermit monk. In the monastic life there is a constant conversation between the conformity of the daily round of monastic living, which by necessity is a highly conformist, ritualized way of life, versus the freedom this life is supposed to foster. There have always been hermits, who are completely nonconformist. So that's the situation here. This monk is completely nonconformist, living in his own rhythm and his own way, and apparently with great insight and Zen power.
As the days and months came and went like this, rumors of his customs [of his practice] secretly leaked out. Consequently, on one occasion a monk came to ask the master of the hut, "What is Bodhiharma's intention in coming from the west?" [The typical Zen question to test someone's understanding.] The hermit said, "The ravine is deep so the dipper's handle is long."
In other words, our silent life is immeasurably deep, and that is why the world is so complicated, and gives us so many, many useful problems. The monk was staggered by this profound answer. He rushed back to the mountain and told Seppō about this encounter, and Seppō said, "I'll have to go to see for myself, and I'll go test him myself." So Seppō sets off to see him, bringing with him an attendant, who is carrying a razor, because, remember, the monk didn't shave his head. It is the commitment of a monk to keep his head shaved, and it's very nonconformist not to keep your head shaved.
So he goes with a razor. He goes directly to the hut, and as soon as he sees the monk, he says to him, "Express the truth, or I will shave off your hair." Dogen comments:
We must understand "express the truth or I will shave off your hair" seems to say that not to have the head shaved would be to have expressed the truth. [After all, the monk is expressing himself in his life – his lifestyle.] What do you think? If this expression of the truth is an expression of the truth, this hermit might finally go unshaved. Those who have the power to hear this expression of the truth should listen, and should proclaim it to others who have the power to hear.
And then hearing this, the hermit washes his hair and comes before Seppō to have his head shaved. Dogen comments:
Has he come as the expression of the truth, or has he come as the nonexpression of the truth? Seppō shaves the head of the hermit at once.
And that's the story. So Dogen now gives a little comment to the story.
This episode is truly like an appearance of the udumbara flower. [A rare flower that only blooms every thousand years or so.] It is not only difficult to meet; it may be difficult even to hear. It is beyond the scope of bodhisattvas in the seven sacred stages or ten sacred stages and is not glimpsed by bodhisattvas in the three clever stages or seven clever stages.
In other words, this is a great story. It's Dogen's hyperbolic, medieval Japanese way of saying, "Wow, this is fantastic! Nobody could touch this."
Sutra teachers and commentary teachers, and adherents of mystical powers and apparitions, cannot fathom it at all. "To meet the Buddha's appearance in the world" means to hear a story like this. Now, what might be the meaning of Seppō's "Express the truth and I will not shave your head." When people who have never expressed the truth hear this, those with ability may be startled and doubting, and those without ability will be dumbfounded. Seppō does not ask about "buddha," he does not discuss "the Way," he does not ask about "samadhi," and he does not discuss "dharani." Inquiry like this, while seeming to be a request, also seems to be an assertion.
In other words, Seppō, in his statement, is expressing the truth. "We should research this in detail." So whenever Dogen says that, he means sit with this as a koan. Really understand this for your own life.
The hermit, though, because of his genuineness, is aided and abetted by the expression of the truth [of Seppō] itself and is not dumbfounded. Showing the traditional style, he washes his head and comes forward. This is a Dharma standard at which not even the Buddha's own wisdom can arrive. It may be described as, "manifestation of the body," as "preaching of the Dharma," as "saving of the living," or as "washing the head and coming forward." Then, if Seppō were not the real person he is, he might have thrown down the razor and roared with laughter. [When he saw the monk coming forward, with his hair clean and ready for shaving, he might have roared out laughing.] But because Seppō has real power and is a real person, he just shaves the hermit's head at once. And truly, if Seppō and the hermit were not "buddhas alone, together with buddhas," it could not be like this. If they were not two buddhas together, it could not be like this. The black dragon's pearl is tirelessly guarded by the black dragon, but it rolls naturally into the hand of a person who knows how to take it. Let us remember [reviewing now] Seppō testing the hermit, the hermit seeing Seppō, expression of the truth, nonexpression of the truth, the hermit having his head shaved, and Seppō shaving his head. So, in conclusion, there are ways for good friends in the expression of the truth to pay unexpected visits. And between friends who are unable to say anything, although they do not expect recognition, the means are already present for their selves to be known. [In other words, through their saying nothing, and through their needing to say nothing, their communication is complete.] When there is learning in practice of knowing the self, there is the reality of expressing the truth. [In other words, expressing the truth does not need to be something extra or more than needs to be done.]
So I think this is a sweet story. I really like that story, and I remember hearing it many times, long ago.
So, as we learned, the expectation would be that this nonconformist hermit, when asked, "Express the truth, or I will shave your hair off," would express the truth. He would make an expression, and there are many Zen stories in which people do make an expression. The typical, ordinary Zen thing would be to make some powerful, individual expression of the truth. Dogen tells us that Seppō is expressing the truth himself, and the hermit monk expresses the truth through fully according with simple monastic decorum, rather than feeling he's got to express himself. He submerges himself as his expression. In other words, this is Dogen's wonderful paradox: How do you express the truth that transcends monastic decorum? Through monastic decorum. You express freely, without attachment to, without being stuck on. As an expression of freedom, you conform.
It might be a little deceptive, because when we hear a "shaved head," we might think this has to do with ordination vows, but it doesn't, because this monk is already ordained. It's just about custom and decorum. If, when the monk presented his head to be shaved, Seppō had laughed and thrown down the razor, then, as Dogen says, Seppō would not have gone far enough. He would have been making some personal expression; but to really own one's personal expression, one can go beyond it and simply express oneself through someone else's words – through a tradition, through a custom. So Seppō shaves the head, rather than laughing and being jolly, as would have happened in a conventional Zen story. So this is completely upside down. Dogen says that we can overthrow the monastic forms and express the dharma freely by simply taking up the monastic decorum, exactly as it is.
So, for all of us, the real trick here and the real lesson here is to be able to take up and put down, at the right time, whatever is appropriate to the situation. To express ourselves by being completely in tune with life as it is now, in this time and place. Sometimes it's about silence – it's about returning to a quiet mind, absolutely not talking, even when we meet a friend, and even when there's something to say. Sometimes it's like that. Like this week in sesshin. It's very simple and very quiet, and we express the truth with a wiping cloth and a setsu.
The point is, can we wholeheartedly pick up an appropriate response in a given situation, and put it down when life changes, so we are ready for every new joy and every new disaster?
Dogen on Truth – Second talk of St. Dorothy Sesshin 2008. This talk os based on Dogen’s “Dotoku” or “Expressing the Truth” as found in the Shobogenzo, Nishijima and Cross 3 volume translation.
Dogen on Truth (1 of 2)
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | October 20, 2008
Abridged and edited by Ryusen Barbara Byrum
So I thought I would take some days during the sesshin to read with you this fascicle of Dogen's called Dotoku. This is the Nishijima translation, and I'm limited to this one, because I didn't bring any others. Dogen translates Dotoku as "Expressing the truth." Here is Nishijima's footnote to the two characters that form the title of this fascicle:
Two meanings of do [Pronounced do in Japanese and dau in Chinese. Same character, but different pronunciations, and the same meaning in both languages] are relevant in this compound. One, "to speak" or "to express something with or without words." [So the word do in Japanese also has the meaning of "to speak." The word for "way" or "truth" also means "to speak or express," but with or without words.] And two, it means "the way" or "the truth." The other character, toku, also has two meanings. One, "to be able to do something," or "to be possible." And two, "to grasp, to get, to attain, attainment, and by extension, attainment of the truth itself." As an expression in Buddhism, dotoku means, "Expressing the truth, saying what one has got," or "speaking attainment."
This is one of the things I am always talking about. There isn't this thing called "dharma," or "Buddhism," or the "truth" – this thing out there, that exists, somehow floating somewhere, which we then make manifest. It doesn't exist other than being made manifest. So that's why it is so important that we manifest and express the teachings. If we think of the teachings as something outside ourselves that we're trying to get and understand, and if we don't realize that it is something that we have to be and express, and that it is through our expression and our being it that it comes alive, then we're really missing the point.
So there is no do without toku. There is no truth without expressing the truth. That's the sense of the title. Dogen writes,
The buddhas and the ancestors are the expression of the truth. [So they are that. There's nothing that they do, beyond being what they are. Their whole life, the whole manifestation of their lives, is that expression.] Therefore, when Buddhist ancestors are deciding who is a Buddhist ancestor, they're always asking, "Do you express the truth or not?"
The buddha ancestors' job is to raise this question by their activity – to call us into question and ask us to express the truth. That's how they help us. Their lives are the expression of the truth, and their specific commitment is to raise this question for us. Do we express the truth or not?
They ask this question with the mind. They ask it with the body. They ask it with a staff and a whisk. [We might say they ask it with an orioki bowl and spoon, or a bell, or a striker, or a spatula in a pot in the kitchen.]
In other words, when we are asked whether or not we express the truth, we think of this as a cognitive thing. Somebody comes up and asks us whether we express the truth, and we're supposed to come up with the answer to that, as if we were in school. But this is a different thing. Yes, the buddha ancestors ask it with the mind, but they also ask it with the body, and they ask it with a pot and a spatula. It is a question being asked as we move through the kitchen.
They also ask it with outdoor pillars and stone lanterns. [Or we could say we also receive this question from the trees and the hills and the leaves on the path and the buildings.] In other buddha ancestors the question is lacking, and the expression of truth is lacking, because the reality is lacking.
So I guess you could take that in two ways.One way is: too bad for the other people who don't know what we know – they're missing out. Or, you could take it that everybody is included. Who is not included in the category of buddha ancestors? Everybody is included.
Such expression of the truth is not accomplished by following other people, and it's not a faculty of our own ability either. [How does it come about, then? If we don't follow others, and it's not a matter of imitating others, and we can't do it ourselves, then how does it come about?] It is simply that where there is the buddha ancestors' pursuit of the ultimate, there is the buddha ancestors' expression of the truth.
In other words, it's not others who show us. It's not our own ability that brings it forward. It is engaging in the process of following the Way, the path of practice of the ancients – which means everybody – that this expression of truth will arise.
In the past they have trained inside that very state of expressing the truth and have experienced it to the end.
The ancients have engaged fully in this way, so much so, that it disappeared. It dissolved. And this is the wonderful thing about practice – it disappears. After awhile there isn't any practice anymore. And that's wholehearted effort. As long as there is some practice to do, there's more effort to be made to let go and to come to the end of practice. So practicing fully is to come to the end of practice, so that practice disappears, and there's nothing – just living and dying. "Practice" is just some extra word that somebody puts on top of that, because we seem to need it from time to time, but actually there's nothing there. So these buddha ancestors trained inside this, and they came to the end of it. And they're still making effort. And they're still pursuing the truth inside that state. So the buddha ancestors are still exerting their effort all the time. Having come to the end of effort, having come to the end of practice, they continue going on.
When buddha ancestors, through making effort to be buddha ancestors, intuit and affirm a buddha ancestor's expression of the truth, this expression of the truth naturally becomes three years, eight years, thirty years, or forty years of effort, in which it expresses its truth with all its energy.
So it's as if he were talking to us. Some of us here have been inspired by this and have been making effort three years. Some of us eight years. Some of us thirty years. Some of us nearly forty years. It becomes that as time goes on, and time becomes the agency of practice. The expression of the truth turns into three years or eight years or thirty years.
During this time, however many tens of years it is, there is no discontinuation of expressing the truth.
This is what I was talking about before – the importance of continuity. In our practice this is perhaps the most emphasized aspect – continuity of practice, being there every moment with your life. And, of course, Dogen means this in the widest possible sense. Even when you lose track of it, the continuity is still going on. You might have forgotten about it, but the buddha ancestors have not forgotten about it. Your life is still held in this container of dharma. It is very mysterious and very beautiful.
This is why it never surprises me when somebody comes along and says, "Twenty five years ago I went to the Zen Center, and I saw you there. I forgot about it all this time, and now it is time to come back." There are many different versions of this story. I realized that even for someone who reads one word in the dharma book, or encounters one moment of practice, the continuity never ends. Even if from their point of view they think they haven't been doing it for a long time, in the bigger picture of things, there is endless continuity. And, of course, effort and practice is to be aware of that continuity and to manifest it, so that we can be a light that illuminates others. And then they have continuity too. No matter how many years it is, there is no discontinuation of expressing the truth.
Then, when the truth is experienced to the end, insight at that time must be true.
So that's the test of true insight. It's not that it conforms with some pre-existing idea, but rather that it is the activity of experiencing practice to the end. Experiencing practice wholeheartedly, to the point where practice as an extra thing has fallen away, and there is just whole hearted engagement. So full engagement means insight will be true. Even if insight differs from person to person, and time to time, with full engagement comes true insight.
Because it confirms as true the insights of former times, the fact is beyond doubt that the present state is the expression of truth.
So I think that when you really engage in the practice fully, experiencing it to the end, you realize and confirm for yourself the teachings. The insights of the ancients seem to you to be quite contemporary and make perfect sense. They don't seem outside of you. So you see the identity between the insights of former times and the present moment. You see how all of it is an expression of the truth.
The present expression of the truth is furnished with the insights of former times, and the insights of former times were furnished with the present expression of the truth.
When Dogen talked about the buddha ancestors, this was very alive for him – these people were standing next to him. They were part of his life, just as he is part of our life. He's useless without us. We have to illuminate him, otherwise Dogen makes no sense. And this is what we do for one another. Our lives illuminate each other. Lives from the past illuminate the present, and the life of the present illuminates the past. We redeem our parents and our grandparents and our ancestors through our present activity. And their activity, and the nobility of their struggling and suffering, gives us our life now. We don't really appreciate our life until we see all of them in us. Then we are really living our life. And then we are saving them, just as they, in their times, saved their ancestors as well. That's what Dogen is saying here.
When we give meaning to our own lives through spiritual engagement, we're giving meaning to the past. We're bringing the past alive in the present and honoring it.
So we're not just reading Dogen; we have a relationship. Sometimes maybe we're pissed off at him, and years go by, and we say, "Heck with him. I don't like him anymore. He's so troublesome, bothersome. Forget about him." Years go by, and Dogen is doing his thing, somewhere in the ancient past. Dogen is not just sitting there, doing nothing. He may be dead, but he is in full development all the time. So next time we go back to him, we see that he has improved quite a bit! [Laughter]
So these are active, ongoing relationships, just as Dogen had a very active and ongoing relationship with his predecessors in the dharma. We're grappling with one another, as we do with our friends. It's not always smooth and easy, but it's always real.
It is for this reason that expression of the truth exists now, and insight exists now. [Because of the whole past and the engagement of the past.] Expression of the truth now, and insights of former times are a single track, ten thousand miles long.
Actually, I'm astonished by this saying. It is actually a single iron rail ten thousand miles long. Suzuki Roshi also used this saying. Here Dogen's using it, and it sounds like a railroad track. But there were no railroads in the thirteenth century, and he is quoting this from ancient Chinese sources. Where did they get this idea of a single iron track ten thousand miles? Iron, I think, implying strength and endurance and power.
So this is the power. This is the source of our strength. We all know that just by ourselves we're not that strong. Any one of us is not that strong, and even all together we have a lot more strength, but even all together, we're not that strong. But when any one of us, and all of us together, really give ourselves to our lives and just be what we are, then we realize we are in solidarity with the whole of humanity from the whole ancient past. Then there's real strength. Then we really have the strength to endure anything, and we can just go forward. This is also an image of continuity, right? One iron rail, going on for ten thousand miles. We have that spirit of continuing our practice with strength, no matter what happens.
Effort now continues to be directed by the expression of the truth itself and by insight itself.
In other words, it's not that we're making effort in a frustrating way. "Oh, I'm not getting this right and I want to get this. How come they can get this, and I can't? What's the matter with me?" We're not making that sort of effort anymore. We're making the kind of effort that is directed by the expression of the truth itself. So there's a kind of serenity and matter-of-fact joy in ongoing effort in practice, because the effort itself is inspired by the expression of the truth.
Having accumulated long months and years of holding onto this effort, we then get free of the past years and months of effort.
It's as if the effort of the past can be very burdensom, because maybe now we are blinded by what we've experienced before and what we think we know. But the result of the effort inspired by expression of the way is that we are free of the past, even as we manifest the whole of the past in our activity in the present.
While we are endeavoring to get free, the skin, flesh, bones, and marrow are all equally intuiting and affirming freedom.
So we're trying to get free. We're making this effort. We're not complacent. We're really struggling and striving and making effort to get free. And while we're doing that, and even though we are striving for it, we're manifesting it at the same time. It's there already, at the same time. This reference to skin, flesh, bones, and marrow basically stand for levels of depth. If you can imagine the skin, flesh, bones, marrow – a hierarchy of depth. So all levels of our living, not only at the spiritual levels, but also the material levels and ordinary, everyday levels are simultaneously operative. At all levels of our living, we're always making efforts to understand, to do the right thing, and in the very effort to understand and do the right thing, on all these levels of our lives, truth is being manifest already. In other words, we think we are striving for truth, but in the very striving, the truth is there.
Landscapes, mountains, and rivers are all intuiting and affirming freedom together.
Now Dogen widens the picture and makes it clear that he is talking about something beyond our intellectual efforts or what we consider to be our spiritual efforts. The whole world is involved. In other words, the whole manifested world is this process, and we share in it, and although we have our own human way, which involves intention and thought and language, it's a bigger question than that. The whole of reality is engaged in this as well.
At this time, while we are aiming to arrive at freedom as the ultimate treasure object, this intention to arrive itself is real manifestation. So right in the moment of getting free there is the expression of truth, which is realized without expectation.
So our very intention to continue to practice, which arrives in us by virtue of our past effort, and from which we are eventually freed, is already itself a manifestation. And so, in our moments of freedom, which come one after the other, we are expressing truth, even though we don't think we're expressing truth. This expression of truth is realized without expectation. So much of our own suffering and self-consciousness has to do with our expectation, which has to do with our self-judgment. Here he is saying that having this heartfelt intention to go on in living and practicing in this way is already manifesting the expression of truth without any expectation, without any self-consciousness, and without the need to be or do anything.
It is beyond the power of the mind, and beyond the power of the body, but naturally there is expression of the truth.
In other words, we can't do this. Our mind can't do it, and our body can't do it. It's beyond us, and yet it's there in our living. We don't see this in ourselves, but we can see it in others. We can see the beauty of others, even in their struggles, even in their suffering. Everybody is frustrated because we want it to be within our power. We want it to be in the power of our mind and our body, but it is beyond that, and so we struggle, and that very struggle is the expression of the truth. We just have the intention, and we make the effort.
When expression of the truth is already happening to us, it does not feel unusual or strange. [Nothing special. No big deal. It doesn't feel unusual or strange when we are manifesting it.] At the same time, when we are able to express this expression of the truth, we leave unexpressed the non-expression of the truth.
So this has all been sounding pretty good so far. We're getting hyped up about this "Yeah, yeah, the expression of truth. Expression of truth. This is good. I like this. I'm an expression of the truth, even if I don't try. It's in the body and in the mind even though it's beyond the body and the mind. I like this. This is good." But we've left something out. We haven't expressed the nonexpression of the truth, so we have to look further. We were getting excited and attached about the expression of the truth, but now we have to look a little further.
Even if we have recognized expressing the truth as expressing the truth, if we have not experienced to the end the state of not expressing the truth, as the state of not expressing the truth, ours are never the real features of the buddha ancestors, nor the bones and marrow of a buddha ancestor.
The point here is that we have to let go. In other words, in order to really express the truth, we have to be bothwilling to express the truth and fully and also completely willing not to express the truth. Because if we get hung up on expressing the truth, we won't be expressing the truth. We have to fully accept and embrace both sides of this equation. And that's really the truth, when you think about it. To really speak, you have to know how to be silent. If you're jabbering all the time, you're saying a lot, but you're not really speaking. A person who speaks words that matter is a person who knows how to keep silent. And also, if we want to act in the world, we must learn how to do non-action. Doesn't that make sense?
You could say, and I think it's the truth, that all week long we're learning by sitting here and doing absolutely nothing. We're learning how to be very effective in the things that we do in the world to help others in this lifetime. That's what Dogen is saying. If you really want to help, you have to know how not to help. You have to know how to leave alone. If you only know how to help, in the end, it's not really help enough.
So who would have thought of that? But Dogen brings this up. Even if you've recognized expression of the truth as expression of the truth, if you haven't recognized non-expression of the truth as non-expression of truth, then you don't really know the way of the buddha ancestors. So, isn't that wonderful?
Talk on Dogen’s “Great Enlightenment” as found in “Beyond Thinking” by Kazuaki Tanahashi.
Dogen Great Enlightenment 2
By Zoketsu Norman Fischer | October 15, 2008
Abridged and edited by Ryusen Barbara Byrum
Last week Chris discussed the story about the monk who says, "What happens when a person who is greatly enlightened becomes deluded?" Tonight we'll talk about the third story, that appears on page sixty-eight of the text.* But I think I am going to start with the previous paragraph, which could be either the end of the discussion of the last story, or could be an introduction to the discussion of this third and final story:
Indeed, [daigo] great enlightenment is limitless, delusion is limitless, and delusion does not hinder great enlightenment; take up three-fold great enlightenment and turn it into a half-fold minor delusion.
This is a way of saying that delusion and enlightenment are completely mixed up with each other. They are completely different and yet the same.
Thus, the Himalayas are greatly enlightened to benefit the Himalayas. Wood and stone are greatly enlightened taking the forms of wood and stone. Buddhas' great enlightenment is greatly enlightened for the sake of sentient beings. Sentient beings' great enlightenment is greatly enlightened by buddhas' great enlightenment. This goes beyond before and after. [Beyond the conventions of time.] Great enlightenment right at this moment is not self, not other. [It's not in me. It's not in you. It's not limited to either one of us, or anything else.] Great enlightenment does not come from somewhere else – the ditch is filled in and the stream is stopped up. [I think it means the ditch is overflowing, and the stream is overflowing, even though it says ‘stopped up.' In other words, great enlightenment is like an abundance of water that fills up every ditch and overflows every stream.] Great enlightenment does not go away – stop following others. How? Follow all the way through.
So in a way, I think, the whole essay is expressed in that one paragraph. And one thing that I forgot to say in the beginning was that the character dai is translated as "great" – daigo – Great Enlightenment. The Zen understanding of that character doesn't mean "great" as opposed to "not so great" – as in "this is great," and "that's not so great." This over here is better than that over there. It doesn't usually mean that. It means great in the sense of "without limit, universally great, beyond definition, beyond distinction, without boundary." So that's why in this essay Dogen is specifically talking about Great Enlightenment. This is not the enlightenment that is often spoken of. It's Great Enlightenment – Daigo – boundless, endless enlightenment. It is unlimited enlightenment that can't be reduced to saying, "I had an enlightenment. Now I'm enlightened." That kind of enlightenment is very small compared to Daigo, Great Enlightenment.
Now, if you think about this for a moment, if something is beyond limit, without boundary, then it can't be exactly something, because every something is limited by not being something else, right? Every something is not boundless and limitless. Every thing is necessarily bounded by its own parameters.
So when we say that enlightenment is Great Enlightenment, unlimited enlightenment, without boundary, as Dogen is saying here, we're saying that it isn't anything. We're saying that it's not something. Every something has some sort of boundary. So even being itself – any sort of being – is always limited.
But Great Enlightenment is not exactly not limited. Great Enlightenment is not a something or anything, but also it is not existing. You can't even say it exists, because existence itself is bounded. It's bounded by non-existence, just as our existence is very much circumscribed by our non-existence. So to say the Great Enlightenment is great enlightenment without limit, without boundary, is to say that it is not something, and that it does not exactly exist or not exist. On the other hand, it's not right to say it's nonexistent, because that also would be bound, right? Nonexistence is exactly bound by existence. It's limited by existence.
So this is Dogen's great point in this whole fascicle. Great Enlightenment, as he understands it, is everything and nothing. Always present in various forms, but unidentifiable, ungraspable – not really existing or not existing. And so, given that, he can say that there is a Great Enlightenment of wood and stone. There's a Great Enlightenment of Buddhas. There is a Great Enlightenment of sentient beings. Ordinary people, who we might think are not enlightened, by definition participate in this Great Enlightenment. And each one has his own place, her own place, its own place, and there is no hierarchy of value, because all equally share in the Great Enlightenment. And as the end of this paragraph makes clear, Great Enlightenment is in each thing and each one of us. In the light of Great Enlightenment, there is no self and other.
So let's say that is the introduction to the following story:
Mihu of Jingzhao sent a monk to ask Yangshan, "Do people nowadays pretend to have enlightenment?" Yangshan said, "It's not that they are not enlightened, but how can they avoid falling into the secondary?" The monk returned and reported this to Mihu, who then approved Yangshan.
The implication is that in the old days people did practice enlightenment, or rely on enlightenment, but "nowadays" everything is corrupt. People aren't what they used to be. So do people nowadays – in the present day – still depend on enlightenment? Do they still make effort for enlightenment? This is Dogen writing in the twelfth century about a story that probably happened at least a century or two centuries earlier. So by the tenth century, things are already downhill. Modern times. Already the Song dynasty is not what it used to be in the Tang. So these moderns nowadays, do they still try to practice Great Enlightenment, or is it too late for them? These people who are not as spiritually powerful as they once were in the old days? So, in other words, they're pretending. They're not really doing it.
So it strikes me that this is actually a great question for us. If we could say the practitioners were decadent in the tenth century, how about now in the twenty-first century? In our crazy world? Does it make any sense for us to practice with reference to Great Enlightenment? Actually, not Great Enlightenment – just enlightenment. It's so noisy around here – so busy. We can't go on ninety-day retreats or enter monasteries like they did in the old days. So maybe we should forget about enlightenment and just try to calm down a little bit. Get a little more sane. Maybe not be so pushed around by our emotions. In other words, there's plenty of things we can do in practice without worrying about enlightenment. So is there any point nowadays in trying to rely on enlightenment?
As Chris said last week, twenty-five, thirty, or forty years ago, when people here were practicing Zen and Buddhism, they were trying to obtain a very specific state called enlightenment – something like being on LSD, only better, more permanent – maybe an ethical system, or something like that. We don't know exactly what. But then, after many years of trying to do this, and finding out that they weren't getting enlightened, maybe they got over that. Now we're just trying to be better people.
So that is the question being asked here. And it's a good question. It's not an unreasonable question. So let's pretend that this is us asking Yangshan, "Does it make sense for us nowadays, in our condition, to aspire to, to make effort toward, to make enlightenment part of our practice? Or is this not what we're doing?"
So we go to Yangshan and say, "Should we be making effort for enlightenment? It doesn't make sense for us anymore." And Yangshan would turn around to us and say, "Well, it's not that you're not enlightened. It's just that you can't avoid falling into the secondary."
The secondary here, I think, means the relative world, the ordinary world. More specifically, I think it means the conceptual world, which is the ordinary world. In other words, we operate on a daily basis according to conceptual frameworks. You know – me/you, this/that. We have a set of ideas that precede us wherever we go, and everything we do is inspired by that set of ideas. That's the secondary. And presumably the primary would be experience that goes beyond those secondary conceptions – a kind of pure awakening experience – the one that we were all trying to get twenty-five or thirty years ago.
So in response to the question, "Should we be having enlightenment as part of what we're doing?" Yangshan is saying, "It's not that you're not enlightened. It's just that you cannot avoid falling into the secondary."
So we are participating in the Great Enlightenment. This dimension of our lives defies our capacity to grasp it conceptually. So we might say that we're not experiencing it somehow in some primary way, and we're not grasping it conceptually, so why don't we forget about it?
But he is saying, "No, you can't forget about it, because you are that. You are that Enlightenment. But you will fall into the secondary. Don't think you won't."
That's where we live – in the secondary. I think the implication here is that it's not a matter of "Darn it. We shouldn't be in the secondary. We should be in the primary. We should be living in some state of enlightenment, where the colors are brighter all the time." He's saying, "No. Actually the secret is that these two, the secondary and the primary, the ordinary mundane world and the enlightened world, are not two different things. They're mutually reinforcing. Mutually inclusive."
Don't think that being enlightened is avoiding falling into the secondary. Embracing the secondary as the secondary, embracing the conceptual as the conceptual, embracing the ordinary as the ordinary, is the way Great Enlightenment is manifested.
That's how I commented on the story. Now Dogen comments on the story. He says that when he says "nowadays," what it really means is "now." "Nowadays" actually means "now." History changes, and conditions change, but "now" – time itself, every moment – doesn't really change. Being itself doesn't really change. The styles change, the clothes change, the way people think changes, but existence doesn't change.
The nowadays spoken of here is the right now of each of you. Even if you think of the past, present and future millions of times, all time is the very moment, right now. Where you are is nothing but this very moment. Furthermore, this eyeball is this moment, a nostril is this moment. [These are kind of words that mean the great significance of our lives is to be found in entering this moment.] Quietly investigate this question [the original question]: Do people nowadays make use of enlightenment or not? [Should people nowadays practice enlightenment or not?] Revive [investigate] this question with your heart, revive this question with the top of your head.
So, this enlightenment, the ultimate limitless life, is not something that we should be ignoring in our practice. It should be our koan. What is it? What is the Great Enlightenment here and now in our living? We are working in the secondary, trying to work with our emotions, trying to be more kind, trying to be more present in a simple way. We shouldn't ever lose track of the mysterious limitlessness of our lives. And that's not an experience we are looking to have; it's a turning of a question. It's a passionate question. Questioning with all our heart, every moment.
These days shaven-headed monks in Song China vainly look for enlightenment, saying that enlightenment is the true goal, though they don't seem to be illuminated by the light of buddha ancestors. [In other words, they say they are looking for enlightenment, but they seem to be very far removed from the real teaching.] Because of laziness they miss the opportunity of studying with true teachers. They may not be able to attain liberation even if they were to encounter the emergence of authentic buddhas.
So he's criticizing the monks of Song China. It's kind of amazing, when you think about it. Dogen made this harrowing journey to China, which was really taking his life in his hands, so that he could encounter the original Buddhism from the old country. And when he got there, he was terribly disappointed in all the practitioners. And it took him a long time to find somebody who he thought was really good. So it must have been very devastating to him, when you think about it, having gone all that way, not to find people he could respect. And their laziness, I think, was not necessarily laziness in their practice, but that they were lazy in their concept of enlightenment as being something they could attain through their efforts – a state of mind, something that they could get or not get. It was so limiting to Dogen, their completely missing the point.
The Great Enlightenment is just life engaged at its depth – not a special state of mind, a special attainment.
Mihu's question does not mean that there is no enlightenment, that there is enlightenment, or that enlightenment comes from somewhere else.
It doesn't mean any of those things. It doesn't mean there's no enlightenment. It doesn't mean that there is enlightenment. It doesn't mean that enlightenment would come from somewhere else.
This question asks whether or not people … [make use of enlightenment.]
Here Kaz says ‘pretend' to have enlightenment. The question is not whether there is enlightenment, or there isn't enlightenment, or if it comes from somewhere else, or you already have it. It's none of that. It's do you activate awakening in your life?
It's like saying, "How are people nowadays enlightened?" If you speak of "achieving enlightenment," you may think that you usually don't have enlightenment. [You didn't have it before.] If you say, "Enlightenment comes," you may wonder where it comes from. If you say, "I have become enlightened," you may suppose that enlightenment has a beginning. [But how could the Great Enlightenment actually have a beginning or an ending?] Mihu did not speak that way. When he spoke of enlightenment, he simply asked about pretending to have enlightenment.
Kaz uses the word "pretend," but it means "turning enlightenment, making use of enlightenment, relying on enlightenment, practicing enlightenment." In other words, it's a process, a commitment, an engagement. It's not a thing – like going to the dealer and buying enlightenment. "I'd like the latest model. The one that gets good mileage." It's not like that kind of a thing. An inner thing or an outer thing – what's the difference? Either way we are talking about something acquired. It's not like that. It's a process, it's an activity. It's an engagement with life.
We have so many assumptions about this. All of our ideas about improvement and spiritual awakening are based on these sorts of faulty, materialistic assumptions.
Yanghan's word how can they avoid falling into the secondary mean that the secondary is also enlightenment.
A lot of people who engage in spiritual practice – maybe all of us – get bored with the secondary, and we want some other, higher realm. But he is saying that if you can fully engage the secondary with this sense of mystery, it's enlightenment. The secondary is like saying "to become enlightened," "to get enlightenment," or "enlightenment has come." It means that "becoming" and "coming" are enlightenment.In other words, the becoming part, the working toward, the process, the effort. This sounds like what we read in "The Point of Zazen" – effort without desire. Making effort joyfully – that is the awakening. And there's no limit to it.
It may look like Yangshan was cautious about falling into the secondary and was denying secondary enlightenment. But the secondary that becomes enlightenment is no other than the secondary that is true enlightenment. This being so, even the secondary, the hundredth, or the thousandth is enlightenment. It is not that the secondary is capped by the primary. Don't say that yesterday's self was the true self, but today's self is the secondary self.
It's kind of ridiculous to say that. Yesterday I was really myself, but today I have fallen off of that, and next week, it will be even worse. No, every day we are completely ourselves, 100%. So whatever is coming up, whatever the situation is, the Great Enlightenment is right there.
Don't say that enlightenment just now is other than enlightenment yesterday. It is not that enlightenment has begun this moment. [It's always been unfolding.] Study in this way. Thus, great enlightenment is black, great enlightenment is white.
So all three stories in this fascicle are talking about the complete interpenetration between delusion and enlightenment. Talking about the fact that our minds are always limiting and distinguishing and conceptualizing. But no matter what our minds are doing – whether it looks like we are operating under delusion or operating under wisdom – great enlightenment is always there. We shouldn't privilege so-called enlightenment over delusion. Privilege primary over secondary.
So what do we do with that information? What does that mean to us? I hope it gives us all a lot of encouragement to go forward in practice. Not to think, "Darn, I'm not enlightened. I'm not getting anywhere. I really want to get somewhere." Or, "I used to be somewhere, but now I'm nowhere."
Today I was in a very grouchy mood – you know, too many things to do. Things break and you have to fix them, and then you have more things to do. So I was grouchy. I just started reading Daigo, and felt, "Ah, this is so great!" It really cheered me up immediately. It took me about fifteen minutes, and I was all cheered up. I felt, "What's the difference if things break, or if there are a lot of things to do? What's the difference? Why would I be complaining about that, if it weren't for the fact that I've conjured up a whole universe of grumpy thoughts for no reason. Why not take up the next moment of my life, and give it all I've got, however it turns out?" I didn't exactly think all that, but I was just happy. So the tenor of my day was just changed.
So if you ever want to be happy, just sit and read Dogen, and you'll be happy right away. [Laughter] It frees you up. And we are constantly – and that's the whole point – we constantly, constantly, no matter how much we know better, we're constantly binding ourselves with our conceptions of what we think we want, what we think is going on in the world, who we think we are, what's wrong, what's right, and so on and so forth.
And so we have to remind ourselves just to make effort. And for us, the effort is to do our practice. It's Great Enlightenment – without limit, right there in the middle of our being-existing.
* From Beyond Thinking – A Guide to Zen Meditation, edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi.
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