Dharma Talks from Myoki Sensei
What Are You Waiting For?
Eihei Dogen wrote Gakudo Yojinshin, Points to Watch in Studying the Way, in 1234 when he returned from China to Japan and was establishing his first monastery Koshoji for novice monks who were interested in practicing with him.
In Section 4 of Gakudo Yojinshin, “Do not Practice Buddha-Dharma with Gaining Mind,” Dogen teaches that bodai-shin, the awakened heart-mind, is free from practicing to gain something. Dogen was forging new ground in Buddhist practice in Japan at that time by teaching novice monks that genuine practice was practice without goals, without intentions to gain political favor, prestige and money for the monastery. He taught his monks that genuine practice was free from desire for favor, for fame, for profit, for respect, not even for personal benefit. This was a radical idea in Japan at the time.
He preaches: “How should we carry out practice, attuning our practice aspiration with the way? We should refrain from favoring and rejecting, and should free ourselves from desires for fame and profit. Practicing the buddha-dharma should not be done for the sake of personal benefit.”
The interesting question for us to ask is: How do these 13th century teachings from our founder pertain to our practice in the 21st century?
Let’s investigate our gaining or craving mind. This is the mind that sets goals and craves to achieve some particular, imagined state or condition at a future time if we practice diligently enough. Shohaku Okumura points out the delusion in this thinking: “When we practice with gaining mind, we will always be frustrated. The goal I make for myself is unattainable because it is not a thing, it is delusion.”
This teaching may be as challenging for us to accept as it might have been for the monks in Dogen’s time. We have inherited a similar prevailing attitude in our achievement-oriented, self-improvement-oriented culture. We have deeply ingrained habit formations and delusions that go something like this: I need to be different; I should be more like that person; maybe practice will make me calmer, more self-assured, confident; I want to understand Zen concepts more deeply; I want to be less anxious, less angry, smarter. Investigate: Do I come to the cushion with subtle goals even though I hear Sawaki Roshi’s words, practice is good for nothing? Our goal-oriented mind can be subtle and wide-ranging, and when we notice it operating on the cushion, become intimate with how craving manifests, we learn to recognize it off the cushion. Picking and choosing, grasping and pushing away are not separate; we crave something because we don’t want it’s opposite—I don’t like this thought/I want different thoughts; my mind is racing/I want to be calmer; when is the bell going to ring, my back hurts, it’s too cold, it’s too hot, the food is too salty, not salty enough, I don’t like washing the floor, I like to sort laundry.
Craving is such a pervasive human habit that Shakyamuni Buddha addressed it in the First Turning of the Wheel: Life’s dissatisfaction is a result of craving/greed, along with its opposite hate/aversion, and ignorance. We suffer when we want reality to be different from what it is. When we verify this truth by our own experience, we bodhisattvas awaken to our craving modes and see that the delusion of craving is inexhaustible. We notice how we are constantly dissatisfied with reality of the present moment. With continuous practice, we observe and experience moments of craving as they appear and pass away, and this noticing opens the way for us to step back and forget the self that craves. Then we can uphold the precepts and we live and be lived for the benefit for all being.
Dogen says: “Practicing the buddha-dharma only for the sake of the buddha-dharma—this is the way.” Since there is no goal, we practice for the sake of practice. We sit on our cushions meeting ourselves moment after moment and letting go of our self-centered desire to achieve some goal.
Dainin Katagiri Roshi teaches in You Have to Say Something: Manifesting Zen Insight: “So without asking for anything, expecting anything, or depending on anything, just do zazen. Then your life will become really alive.” And in Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Record of Things Heard, Dogen writes: “When we no longer seek anything on the basis of our ego-centered mind, this itself is great peace and joy.”
We practice shikantaza simply to practice shikantaza, letting whatever arises to arise, abide, and drop away. We take this teaching off the cushion, and engage in every activity with no gaining mind, not waiting for something else that may happen as a result of our actions, but being fully awake, clearly aware in this moment of life, in this flow of life as moment follows moment. We appropriately respond to whatever is in front of us, without an attachment to a preferred outcome, without expectation. We simply live fully the experience that presents itself at the moment.
Our practice is to respond to what is in front of us with no gaining mind in the same way that we sit shikantaza with no gaining mind. Our place of practice is what Kosho Uchiyama Roshi calls the day-to-day functioning of our life force in all activity. We don’t wait for enlightenment separate from this lived moment and what it presents to us. Just this is it.
“Do ‘Not-understand’”
After his awakening under the bodhi tree, and after some urging from his five dharma brothers, Shakyamuni Buddha devoted his life to teaching the dharma for the benefit of all being. In the first turning of the wheel, he wanted people to understand that their dukkha—their ever-present unease and dissatisfaction— had a cause and had a cure, which was the Eightfold Noble Path of liberation. He continued to turn the dharma wheel throughout his life, transmitting teachings not only to his followers while he was living, but also engendering a lineage of followers and teachers, which is how we come to be here today.
Like Shakyamuni’s followers, we take refuge in Dharma and bow to it as one of the Three Treasures, along with Buddha and Sangha. We chant that we take refuge in Dharma, “entering deeply the merciful ocean of Buddha’s Way.” Refuge in Dharma as the teachings is an integral part of our practice. We read and study texts from our Soto Zen tradition, listen to talks by our fellow sangha members and other teachers, some of us keep practice journals, we talk with each other about practice and about what we’re reading and thinking, as we are doing today and in our Wednesday evening study groups. My question today is: to what end? What impulse impels us to contemplate, with our intellect and with words, the teachings that come to us from our Zen ancestors and our contemporaries?
On one level we are searching for insight and understanding. We have chosen to explore elements of the vast body of teachings that have come down to us throughout space and time. On the other hand, I think of Gensha who asks in Shobogenzo Ikka-No-Myoju, One Bright Pearl, What’s the use of understanding? or variously translated as “What use is understanding?”, “What do you do with your understanding?” and “What use is there in trying to understand this with the intellect?”
And I might whittle this question down even further: what is understanding anyway? What does it mean to understand something and what use or purpose does understanding serve?
Understanding is defined as comprehension, the power to make experience intelligible by applying concepts and categories. Knowing is a synonym of understanding and means having or reflecting information or intelligence.
How does understanding the dharma, the teachings, interpenetrate our lives on and off the cushion? There must be some use in understanding or none of us would be here this morning. We’d be out enjoying the end-of-summer holiday weekend doing something entirely different. But we have from our experience come to realize that understanding the teachings can deeply alter how we see and relate to ourselves, to others, and to the vast universe. In our Western culture we study a discipline or subject out of curiosity or to gain proficiency in a particular field, to learn facts and figures and concepts, but when we study dharma, we experience that our contemplation and questioning has an entirely different and deeper function—to awaken us to our lives so that we can live fully and deeply for all being.
Reading Shohaku Okumura’s writing on Dogen’s Shobogenzo Sansuikyo, Mountains and Waters Sutra, I learned that Dogen emphasizes not-understanding, and that Dogen doesn’t see this not-understanding as a negative state. He uses the term fu-e suru, which Okumura explains means “Do ‘Not-understanding’.” Not-understanding is hyphenated and is one thing that Dogen encourages us to do. To go beyond understanding, to embody not-understanding, says Okumura, “and actually practice it without stagnating in understanding.”
Okumura tells us what this means in his own practice. He says he uses that phrase to describe how he keeps something in his mind without grasping it with his personal “understanding.” This preeminent Zen teacher and Dogen scholar says: “I have been ‘doing not-understanding’ for forty years. [book printed 2018] Sometimes I think I understand, but the next moment or the next day I find that I don’t. This kind of not-understanding is also important. In zazen we let go of our thought. This letting go is ‘not understanding.’ Thought is ‘understanding.’ By letting go we ‘do not-understanding.’ This sitting and letting go of thought, this opening the hand of thought, is the true Dharma eye.”
Those of us who sit regularly have experience with opening the hand of thought. Another question is: How do we make this ‘not-understanding’, this opening the hand of thought, our essential practice off the cushion when studying dharma? We go beyond studying as means to acquire static knowledge, and we practice ongoing investigation, looking closely and observing two things simultaneously—both a text, koan, sutra, teaching as well as our response to the text, the teaching, the words. What’s going on for me as my eyes, brain, mind, and karmic formations encounter and take in the words of any teaching.
If I notice that I feel certain about an understanding I hold, I challenge that certainty and see what happens next. I recognize that all understanding is provisional and dependent on myriad causes and conditions—such as where I was born, the culture that surrounds me, the teachers I have encountered, my age, the time and place in which I live, etc. This applies not only to study, but also to relationships with ourselves and others. We so frequently jump to assumptions about people, their words, their actions, based on thinking we know something about them. What if we approach each interaction with a person by doing not-understanding—completely open to what is in front of us at the moment, without preconceptions, ideas, opinions, beliefs?
Do not-understanding is another way of saying “Investigate thoroughly.” We enact thorough investigation as contemplation and conversation progresses, and we use language to express our provisional understanding. During our sangha discussions, we articulate our current understanding of a text or concept, we listen as others express their understanding and/or ask questions, and we experience how our understanding unfolds into not-understanding, or I can say, with openness and non-clinging comes the inability to nail down any particular solid notion of anything. There is an element of creative play going on; we toy with our individual conceptions, and using language, bounce these conceptions off each other creating the dependent co-arising of not-understanding. Then I leave with nothing solid, and yet…
When we do not-understanding, we are also doing no fixed self and shedding our egoic tendencies to want to hold onto something concrete, to get it right, to know, to satisfy our desire for solid ground, security, a concept to hold onto as “the truth.”
As author and professor of religious and Asian studies Dale Wright writes in Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism, the goal of Zen rhetoric is to bring about “an experience of dislocation and groundlessness,” an experience “somewhat like being suspended over an infinite void, groundless, with nothing to hold on to.”
And yet, it is a mistake to dismiss discursive thinking, intellect and language, the use of words. As Zen practitioners, we are the recipients of a vast body of literature that uses language to express the dharma, and we encounter these gifts with a mind that thinks in language. It is through language that we come to know and go beyond knowing.
Wright says that Zen language can be either the illness that can lull us to sleep when we cling to static states of knowing. He also says that language can be the cure that wakes us up when it functions “not to answer questions and to settle things, but rather to unsettle and open them to alternate viewing.” When we enter the world of Zen language, for example the stories we encounter in the koan collections and in the writings of Dogen Zenji, “most unsettling is the realization that, not only does it not make sense, but it won’t make sense as long as I remain who I am, that is, a subject self supported by particular conventions of placement in the world.” Zen rhetoric and expression disorients our relationship to everything we cling to, especially our arrogant sense that we understand the world we live and act in. Wright puts it this way: “The text acts to evoke disorientation, and then reorientation, of the reader’s subjectivity.”
Wright suggests that when we study and converse about dharma, we should not strive to replace one foundation or set of beliefs with another, which is tempting because it makes us feel secure, but rather we must be willing to experience groundlessness, emptiness, and openness.
Dogen’s writings are admirable for doing just this: disorienting us, dislocating us, and lovingly pressing us to let go of the understanding we cling to, and then reorienting us to a new way of thinking and acting in this life as we drop “understanding” and become comfortable with doing not-understanding.
May we continue to “do not-understanding” together, right here, right now.
Awakened Activity
It is said that at the time of his death when he was eighty years old, the Buddha was sleeping on a bed that had been prepared between two sala trees; his head to the north, his face to the west, and his right hand for a pillow. White flowers bloomed on the sala trees and fell continuously in that place. Hundreds of Buddha’s disciples, the king and his family, men and women of all ages, and birds and animals gathered, deeply mournful.
The Buddha gave his last discourse to those present, and his words included this well-known teaching: “Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves, seeking no external refuge; with the Dhamma as your island, the Dhamma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge.” He encouraged each of his followers to continue to express the teachings he shared during his lifetime. He said that since the Dharma he taught came out of his own realization, the Sangha was not dependent on him for leadership. He assured the sangha that it could continue to practice realization together after his death.
He expounded the fundamental truth that even though his physical body dies, the Buddha is eternal, the Dharma is eternal, the Sangha is eternal. Although individual bodies are subject to impermanence, when the sangha sits together in shikantaza, just sitting, we are practicing with all being throughout space and time, and because of all being throughout space and time. We recognize the dependent co-arising that is beyond space and time, and see and experience our interconnection with all being. Everything comes and goes within the vast infinity of space and time. Impermanence, as in the death of Shakyamuni, does not hinder the space for the future Buddhas and bodhisattvas to practice wisdom and compassion in the world.
Taigen Leighton’s book Visions of Awakening Time and Space: Dogen and the Lotus Sutra, explores how Dogen was deeply influenced by The Lotus Sutra and how some of his teachings interpret this particular premise of The Lotus Sutra: that bodhisattvas (enlightening beings) emerged from under the earth to preserve and expound the Lotus teaching in the distant future and how Shakyamuni Buddha only appears to have passed away, but actually has been practicing, and will continue to do so, over an inconceivably long life span. In Shobogenzo Yuibutsu-yobutsu, Buddhas Alone, Together With Buddhas, Dogen Zenji writes: ‘The activity of all buddha is carried on together with the whole earth and all living beings; if it is not activity that is one with all things, it is not buddha activity.’
Leighton writes that “For Dogen the inconceivable life span is exactly this intention to help all beings awaken, which mysteriously creates the ongoing life of the Buddha. As long as this vow and direction to universal awakening persists in the world and has the potential to spring forth in current practitioners, Dogen sees that the Buddha is alive.”
We are the living Buddha and his realization is present in each of us. This is not a theory. It is our practice of expressing realization with this very body and mind. This is our buddha activity.
We don’t practice with the goal of escaping from samsara and permanently entering nirvana; we vow to remain living in this world for the benefit of all being. We vow to free all numberless beings, end inexhaustible delusions, enter all dharma gates, and become unsurpassable Buddha. Our vow is to look after everything as our own life. We practice for the benefit of and with the entire earth. No one and nothing is left out of our practice or buddha activity.
Dogen expresses over and over his faith that although Shakyamuni’s body entered parinirvana, the Buddha is alive because our ancestors took heed of his last sermon and preserved his teachings, each practitioner carrying the Way forward so it has arrived to us in this present moment as we bodhisattva-buddhas sit here today in our seats in this body and in this life, enacting the life and teachings of Shakyamuni.
We express Buddha with this body-mind when we sit zazen, when we uphold the precepts, when our activity expresses the Bodhisattva vows. The Dharma is alive in us. And we each of us expresses Buddha in our unique particular way. These unique particular expressions interweave into all being buddhanature arising in each moment.
Like Dogen the 18th century Zen monk and poet Ryokan was also inspired by the Lotus Sutra. Here is his poem about Shakyamuni’s parinirvana:
Whether expounding his own or others’ bodies,
He shows passing into nirvana and also continuously abides.
If there were a finish to his expounding on Vulture Peak
The limitless hundreds of rivers would not flow into the ocean.
The Buddha continuously abides. It is because our ancestors continued to embody Shakyamuni’s teachings that we are here today and that others will follow. We are rivers flowing into the ocean of buddhadharma. So in this sense one could say that individual beings are impermanent, but the Dharma, the Way does not die, although it does change from time to time and place to place; Buddha’s fundamental teachings are the foundation of our lives.
In Shobogenzo Yuibutsu-yobutsu, Dogen expresses the limitless rivers flowing into one ocean when he says: “…what Buddhas call the self is the entire earth. Thus there is never an entire universe that is not the self with our without our knowing it.”
Taigen Leighton and Uchiyama Roshi tell us that “For Dogen, the enduring life of Shakyamuni is realized by those who fully give their vitality to the everyday activities of buddha’s practice.”
With this in mind, we can continually ask ourselves—am I fully giving my vitality to everyday activities? Do my every day actions express buddhadharma with steadfastness and commitment? Or maybe another way to ask the question is: What is the appropriate response in each moment and with each action that will carry the buddhadharma forward?
In many Shobogenzo fascicles, Dogen expresses how we do this, how each and every activity is an expression of beyond thinking. Dogen gives detailed instructions on how to wash our face, brush our teeth, prepare food and eat it, bathe—these activities that constitute our daily lives and also express our practice-realization of the Way.
In each awakened activity we uphold the pure precept: “I vow to live and be lived for the benefit of all being.” We sit shikantaza, devotedly study the Way, uphold our vows and precepts as we interact with strangers, and in intimate relationships. We take care for and treat material objects with respect and gratitude. Story about Suzuki Roshi and broom. We protect as best we can all living creatures of the earth, we express our gratitude for water, air, sunlight, respond to injustices with a calm and serene mind without being attached to outcomes. We continually practice with this question: How does my presence in this world and in this life impact this world and the life of all being. Do my actions confirm my vows as the foundation of my life?
I return to the quotation from Shakyamuni: “Therefore, Ananda, be islands unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves, seeking no external refuge; with the Dhamma as your island, the Dhamma as your refuge, seeking no other refuge.” Together we take refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, and at the same time I am an island unto myself. Based on particular causes and conditions of my life, I ask particular questions, come up with provisional understandings, and respond to each moment that I meet on the path in my own way. Ultimately, together we are walking the path in our unique and individual ways.
Have No Designs
[Myoki Sensei shared this talk with sangha during our half-day Zazenkai on February 25, 2024.]
Dogen Zenjo’s teaching in his Fukanzazenji is fundamental to Soto Zen practice, often read aloud daily in Zen communities as part of their morning service, frequently quoted, and extensively commented on. Fukanzazenji, Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen, is the first text that Master Dogen wrote when he returned to Japan in 1227 after spending five years in China studying with his teacher Nyojo (Rujing).
What motivated Dogen to write it? He said he didn’t specifically intend to found a new Zen school, but he did want to spread the true teaching he learned in China, which he said was zazen. He wrote this essay in an effort to challenge what he saw as the misplaced emphasis in Japanese Buddhist practice on scholarly study rather than sitting.
The version that he wrote in 1227 did not survive, so we don’t know exactly what it contained. The surviving versions are the Tenpuku-bon version, dated and signed 1233 and the Rufu-bon (popular version), completed around 1244.
He continued to write variations and expansions of Fukanzazenji as well as additional explorations of zazen practice in fascicles such as Shobogenzo: Zazenshin, The Acupuncture Needle of Zazen (1242); Zazengi, The Standard Method of Zazen (1243); and Zanmei o Zanmei, The Samadhi that is King of Samadhis (1244), indicating that Dogen thought consistently about how to express and teach the practice of shikantaza.
Here is the passage that I want to focus on today as we practice together in Zazenkai:
“For the practice of Zen, a quiet room is suitable. Eat and drink moderately. Cast aside all involvements, and cease all affairs. Do not think good, do not think bad. Do not administer pros and cons. Cease all movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of thoughts and views. Have no designs on becoming a Buddha.” (Waddell/Abe translation)
Dogen begins by instructing us that “For the practice of Zen, a quiet room is suitable. Eat and drink moderately.”
A quiet room is suitable. We take care of our place of practice. Whatever space we have, large or small, a dedicated room or a space in a room, we may keep an altar with a statue of Buddha or Kanzeon. We light a candle and incense, and then we bow to the Buddha and to our cushion and sit.
About twenty percent, or one-fifth, of Fukanzazenji is instruction on how to comport the body, before, during, and after sitting. We do what is necessary to come to our cushions with the body balanced and grounded. We take care of our bodies by wearing comfortable, loose but not sloppy, clothing; eating and drinking moderately, not so much food that we become drowsy during sitting or so little that we are hungry. We take care of our elimination needs.
With these needs attended to, we can sit on our cushion relaxed and upright, hands in the cosmic mudra, dignified, centered, and ready to devote mind and body to simply sitting.
Now Dogen asks us to “cast aside all involvements, and cease all affairs.” As we enter into this sacred space for sacred practice, we leave the mundane world behind. We leave behind our concerns and considerations about the affairs of the day ahead, our ruminations about what happened yesterday, our upcoming our plans and schedules, our relationships, the routine worldly activities that we might say are “on my mind.”
Dogen next instructs us: “Do not think good, do not think bad. Do not be concerned with either right or wrong. Do not judge true or false.” These words are straightforward and most translations are the same for this passage, but there are varying translations for the next section: “Cease all movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of thoughts and views.”
Dogen says to “Cease all movements of the conscious mind.” What is the Buddhist understanding of conscious mind? Shakyamuni Buddha’s teachings assert that there are six sense consciousnesses, rather than the five we are familiar with. In addition to seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching; or eye, ear, nose, tongue, and body as we chant in the Heart Sutra, Buddha adds a sixth sense, consciousness, identifying mind itself as an organ that perceives.
When you hear the sound of the bell that indicates the beginning of a round of zazen, your ears function physiologically. Sound waves contact your eardrum, and the experience of hearing occurs. When we are sitting, there may be many sounds that make our eardrums vibrate. We hear everything, but we don’t make contact with all the sounds. There is a difference between hearing, which is a physiological response to sound waves, and our experience of what we are hearing, which is a function of the mind making contact with the sound and assigning meaning to it. The sound of a bird song might distract us and we think, “Oh what beautiful birdsong. That’s a Carolina wren, I think. Or maybe it’s that other bird I saw in the tree yesterday. What is it called? I wish I could remember. I saw one the other day on the oak tree. That limb should be cut or it could fall on the house in a windstorm….” and on and on and on.
A thing becomes what we call “real” when the organ of perception, its object, and its consciousness come together. Thoughts are a natural production of the brain, in the same way that sweat is secreted from our pores when we’re hot, and saliva is secreted from the glands in our mouths when we walk into a bakery or pizzeria. Mental consciousness occurs when the mind contacts the energy of thoughts, ideas, and images.
Here are Dogen’s instructions again: “Do not think good, do not think bad. Do not administer pros and cons. Cease all movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of thoughts and views.”
As Uchiyama Roshi says, the mind secretes thoughts, emotions, memories, fantasies about the future, etc. and sometimes mind consciousness grasps onto the thought, emotion, memory, fantasy and takes a ride with it, sometimes a long, rambling, wandering ride. At other times a thought arises and disappears without us making contact with it. Our practice is to experience aware presence as thoughts arise and recede into the background without mind consciousness grasping the thought that leads to another thought and another and another.
The translation above says: “Cease all movements of the conscious mind.” Here is another translation of the same passage: “Give up the operations of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop measuring with thoughts, ideas, and views.” Another translation reads: “Halt the revolutions of mind, intellect, and consciousness; stop the calculations of thoughts, ideas, and perceptions.”
I think the translation that says stop the calculations of thoughts, ideas, and perceptions, is more accurate; Dogen’s teaching isn’t to cease or stop thinking, but to cease or stop or give up the calculations and measuring that arise in reaction to the thoughts.
Notice the words that signal intellectual pursuits and evaluations and measurements—the “operations” of the mind, “measuring” thoughts, “calculating.” Dogen asks us to put aside for the time we are sitting our dependency on the intellectual, analytical approach to our lives. This kind of analytic thinking is valuable and necessary in various situations in our lives, but not on our cushions.
Our practice is just to sit with the rising and falling of all experience without thinking “this is good, that is bad.” “This is wrong, that is better.” We let go of attachment, aversion, and judgment. The practice is both simple—we simply sit down in the present moment of being alive—and not so simple, because we have deeply ingrained habit formations of evaluating and judging our thoughts, sensations, feelings, our practice, ourselves. We are seduced by the impulse to gauge our thoughts and views, to indulge this habitual dualistic thinking—wrong right good bad. We push aside what we don’t like, grasp what we like, and constantly judge to know the difference.
The third ancestor Sosan teaches in the poem Hsin-Hsin Ming, Trust in Mind, “If you wish to know the truth, then hold to no opinions for or against anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind.” Picking and choosing is a disease of the mind that seems, when we sit zazen, to be consistently at work. The treasure of our sitting practice is that we become intimate with this disease of the mind.
In his commentary on Fukanzazenji, Maezumi Roshi says: “Dogen Zenji isn’t urging us merely to become like logs or stones. Without any thoughts or views, we can still function clearly, like a bright mirror. The mirror is there, and simply reflects whatever is before it. When the object vanishes, so does the reflection; not a trace remains behind, but the mirror is still there. That’s the state of mind to maintain during the practice of zazen.” Can we experience the mind as clear, empty, and infinite? Simple, but not easy. Philippe Coupey says in his commentary on Fukanzazenji: “If it’s easy, then it’s not authentic.”
When Dogen says we should cease all movements of the conscious mind, he is instructing us to, over and over again, be aware when consciousness focuses on a sound, or an itch, or a thought, and to come back to the basic fact of just sitting. He calls this taking the backward step. And to do this over and over and over again in a round of sitting is our practice. We may experience doubt, but we also have faith and determination to just keep sitting.
This passage ends with Dogen admonishing us to have no designs on becoming a Buddha. There is a wonderful koan. Dogen wrote elaborate and complex teachings on the practice of shikantaza, yet at the same time, he says that we needn’t strive to attain a particular state. He says that practice and realization are the same activity, so we don’t need to worry about becoming a Buddha. In fact, Shakyamuni Buddha didn’t practice to gain realization; he practiced because he was already enlightened.
Our being present with whatever arises, whether on the cushion or off, is the opportunity to be who you are right now. And right now. There is nothing to fix, and no preferred state to strive for. Free yourself from the delusions and fantasies that you hold about becoming enlightened, becoming a buddha, becoming a great Zen Master. Free yourself from these delusions. Who is that person you are imagining? The great enlightened Zen Master is a person you are fabricating in your head. What if you just are you? And why is that a scary notion? To just be who we are?
Taigen Dan Leighton says this in his book, Zen Questions: Zazen, Dogen, and the Spirit of Creative Inquiry: “Just sitting focuses on not trying to get anything from our investment of time from showing up, but not trying to get rid of anything either. Can we actually be present with this body and mind as it is, not our idea of who we are but actually be present with the physical sensations and the swirling thoughts that are happening on our cushion, right now? If you think about what you are going to get out of this experience, that is just consumerism, or turning your experience into some kind of commodity. If you try to get rid of anything, that is also a kind of holding back from actually just being yourself. This is a practice of just radically being yourself, to be completely ordinary, to be a human being, in fact to be the human being on your cushion right now.”
And yet, you will experience transformation when you whole-heartedly commit yourself to Zen practice with nothing to attain, and at the same time without holding anything back. I am certain of this and I think that this is what Dogen is pointing toward when he says further on in Fukanzazenji that zazen is the dharma gate of ease and joy.
I used to understand this phrase to mean that I would feel this ease and joy on the cushion only if and when I let go of thought, preoccupations, memories. Now I can experience the ease and joy in the midst of thought. Thought coexists with ease and joy when I open the hand of self-clinging, and thought just is there, like a sound or a smell. I don’t have to make any special contact with the thought, I don’t have to hold on to it or, as the metaphor goes, invite it in for tea.
Joy can be experienced only with this body and this mind. Joy and ease do not exist somewhere else outside of this moment and this experience no matter where we are. Where else could joy and ease be but right here right now? With continuous practice, the trials and tribulations that once plagued us become less weighty, and we perhaps can even appreciate our suffering. Maezumi Roshi says, “Appreciate Your Life”; he doesn’t say appreciate only those aspects of our life we like and label good, pleasing, or congenial. We appreciate all of life, and all of our miraculous humanness with joy and gratitude for the random gift of our temporary existence in the world. Suzuki Roshi says: “Just being alive is enough.”
Ben Connelly writes this in his book, Vasubandhu’s ‘Three Natures’: A Practitioner’s Guide for Liberation: “. . . everything is always already free from suffering. What you see is what buddhas see, and you cannot be separated from Buddha. Buddha is not a deity; the word means ‘awakened one.’ It means one who is awake to the truth and thus experiences no suffering. The truth is already true, and we are already awake. We don’t have to wait or strive for liberation. This moment is complete and real, beyond all ideas, and freedom is here.”
May we have faith in the truth of these words as our practice continues.
Two Rivers Zen Community: 