1. Master Dogen said that we should not regard our body and mind as our personal possession. There isn’t an ‘I’ to possess. Self, mind and consciousness arise itching experience, not the other way round.
If this is so, we do not need to fret about purifying the mind. This erroneous aim inadvertently strengthens the mind/ world dualism, and all the suffering which flows from it
2. If everything occurs within the jewelled net of Indra ( dependent origination), how can it make any sense to talk of relative and absolute truth? Isn’t it better to describe delusion not as falseness – because nothing is false – but as clinging to or rejecting faces of the jewel? Hence, compassionate activity is liberating the myriad dharmas from my anger, greed and ignorance, and the dream of personal liberation is simply a pernicious and disguised example of delusion.
3. Each morning we wake to the dream of the self. But even so, we are born this day. We are born this day
4. Master Dogen said that we must arouse bodhi mind.
Our primary error as practitioners is to confuse this with our personal mind.
We then imagine that we must make our minds quieter, cleanse from it what we don’t want to be there.
Dogen said that bodhi mind is the mind that sees the impermanence of all things. All things. Not just rocks and trees, but all things, including your personal mind. And for him, as for Nagarjuna, impermanence is a synonym for dependent origination. The pulse of your mind and the pulse of the world is the same pulse.
If we can understand this, then we can understand how bodhi mind, the mind of practice, is the mind which is at one with all things.
If we can understand this, there is nowhere for dualism to cling