In Dogen’s Genjokoan, there’s the following highly evocative passage. (using the Okumura translation)
“Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot become firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the Dharma position of firewood and has its own before and after. Although before and after exist, past and future are cut off. Ash stays in the position of ash with its own before and after.”
The material phrase in this passage is ‘Dharma Position’, (in Japanese) “hōi”. What does Dogen mean by Dharma Position? We can gain some understanding if we consider our actual experience in zazen.
Sometimes it’s as if we’re experiencing ourselves and the whole world as one piece.
There isn’t an inner and an outer. There is just oneness. Obviously, there’s differentiation. But there isn’t duality. And from that actual experience, we can see that in this moment nothing is excluded. In this moment, there are congregations of expressions and activities. There is this person sitting, there’s the birds singing, there is light falling through rain, there is dharma rain making our obstinacy more pliable. And we can see that, in this single moment, absolutely everything is included: all being, all moments.What’s meant by Dharma Position is an actual occurrence in the present moment, which we can think of as a moment of experience, a moment of activity, a moment of expression; something like that.
But what we don’t think of it as is a moment of activity in or from or by a being which continues from past to present to future. The example, which Dogen is using about firewood and ash, says that in our unexamined normal way of thinking, there’s an underlying something [never specified] which is first a seed, and then a young tree, and then a mature tree and then firewood and then ash. Of course, whilst Dogen is using a poetic example he’s really talking about your ash: your birth, your life, your death.
And the suggestion is that although in one sense, to organise things, it’s convenient for us to think that there’s a continuity, which we achieve by fracturing experience into objects that persist over time, in a deeper sense and in a sense which is essential to enable us to understand the depth of our life, there isn’t a continuity of an underlying essence. So, as it were, all the moments, of this life, of your life, of everyone’s life are separate and distinct, but also connected with all being and all moments as moments. There’s not an underlying continuity of beings in time. Of course, each Dharma Position is part of the tapestry of being/time. There appears to be a contradiction, but there really isn’t. And Dogen is drawing out the implications of the perspective of ‘no-self’, which is the founding insight of Buddhism.
To reconfigure the world as not as cause and effect between ongoing entities but rather an ongoing miracle of expression, of exertion, of experience.