“To carry the self forward to experience the myriad things is delusion.
To allow the myriad things to come forward and illuminate the self is enlightenment.”
As always, Dogen is quintessentially talking about zazen.
The myriad things are not just walls, trees, birds, fences and so on, but everything – dreams, memories, waking hallucinations: everything.
The word that is translated as ‘self’, ‘jiko’ means both the small self, the ego, and the self of all things, everything.
But which self is illuminated? One or other? Both or neither?
Even when we are within the wooden box of the small self, we can still see a sliver of sky.