Category: Kusen

In the Genjokoan, Dogen defines delusion and enlightenment.  

His definition of delusion is surprisingly straightforward. He says that to carry the self forward and to encounter the myriad beings is delusion. That’s it!

He doesn’t say delusion is thinking that Lourdes is the capital of France or that that mirage over there is really palm trees and water. It’s not some kind of misapprehension of the world. It’s a configuring and restricting of experience around the self. That’s it! 

In delusion, we go from being within experience to, as it were, our experience being our experience, being mine, taking place within me. In other words, we’re not within the world, the world is within us.  You can phrase it in various ways but I think that’s fairly easy to understand. Living it is another matter, obviously.

The position of Enlightenment is the reverse of that. He says that for the myriad things to come forward and illuminate the self is Enlightenment. At least, that’s the Tanahashi translation.

It seems those two definitions contradict each other but they don’t. The word which is translated as ‘self’, jiko, has two meanings. The first meaning, which applies when he is talking about delusion, means ‘self’ in the way we normally mean it: the ego. But, confusingly, when he turns to enlightenment, the second meaning applies. In this, ‘jiko’ means ‘universal self’. He doesn’t mean that there’s a big spiritual bicycle pump in me that puffs out the small self to fill the universe. He means the whole universe: the whole of manifestation, creation, expression.

That’s why the translation of the second part varies with different writers. It’s not that somehow all the things of the world come within the Treasure House of the Self, like some transcendent version of the Scottish Exhibition Centre. It’s that each thing in its own nature, ungrasped by the self, illuminates everything.

The appropriation of experience to a self stills the voices of all beings. Letting go of this lets all beings sing.

The first lines of the Hsin-Hsin Ming, the Verses of Faith-Mind go as follows: 

“The great way is not difficult, only avoid picking and choosing.

 When Love and Hate do not arise, things cease to exist in the old way.”

It’s fair to say that the general way of looking at that passage is to say that the two parts are the same. In other words, the reference to ‘love and hate’ and the reference to ‘picking and choosing’ is the same thing. And on that assumption we think we primarily require to develop Equanimity,  particularly when we’re practising. From that comes the common instruction that we should allow our thoughts to come and go freely and not be attached to them — not try to push them away or dwell on them.

But that common perspective is both banal and a misunderstanding — the two parts are not the same.

The reference to ‘picking and choosing’ doesn’t  mean that our arising  thoughts are already formed and appear within our awareness. What I think it means is that for a thought to exist (in the normal sense), we require to engage in picking and choosing. We require, in other words, to constrict our attention in order that a mental object or a feeling object, like an emotion, is constructed. 

Because to do that we require to disregard all other aspects of that ‘thought’ or ‘feeling’; the somatic aspect of it, the karmic aspect of it, the environmental aspect of it and various other things. If a thought is arising for me, that thought indicates not that there’s something pre-formed that I should have an attitude of neutrality towards. 

No! 

The fact that the thought (in the normal sense) arises at all  is an indicator that I’m engaging in picking and choosing.  I’m constricting my attention, thus an identifiable thought arises.

It arises from my activity of constriction which I’m unaware of.  So when a thought arises what I require to do is not to take a position towards that thought but recognise that I’m engaged in picking and choosing. In Uchiyama’s words, I “Open the Hand of Thought ”; what I’ve put out of my awareness, in terms of my body, my environment, my karma, and so on is brought back into awareness. When it’s brought back into awareness the thought, as it exists in the old way, disappears. 

So the activity of not picking and choosing, in other words, the activity of not constricting my attention, which you could call the practice of non-duality, means that in consequence, love and hate do not arise, because love and hate require that constriction, because they need to have something specific to adhere to.

Things ‘cease to exist in the old way’ not because we have an attitude of neutrality towards them but because our unconstricted awareness is primarily a wholeness out of which, as if in a dream, specific things appear to arise and disappear.

In Zen legend, when Master Bodhidharma was approaching death,  he called together his four senior disciples and asked them to explain their understanding. 

The first three gave verbal answers. Bodidharma said to them respectively “you have my skin”, “you have my flesh” and “you have my bones”. The fourth disciple Huike (Eko) said nothing, simply did prostrations then returned to his place. Bodhidharma then gave the transmission to him.

That story was subsequently used in zen to justify an anti-intellectual stance, which continues to this day.

Though not from Dōgen. In Katto, he gave an entirely different interpretation of the story. In his view, it was a completely erroneous understanding to think that skin is superficial and marrow is profound. Or, as he said in another context “If your speech is superficial, why would your silence be profound?”

There’s an aspect to the story which I don’t think has been properly explored. In the translations, Bodhidharma appears to refer to his skin, his flesh, his bones, his marrow, but I don’t think that’s an accurate rendition.  He wasn’t talking about his own body.

Or just his own body. He was talking about the body of the True Teacher.

The True Teacher appears when sincere practitioners gather together.

What could you call that True Teacher?

You could say that we’re not him, that we’ll never be him, but we can be a part of him, this body of sincere practitioners.

I believe Bodhidharma was referring to the skin, flesh, bones, and marrow of The True Teacher, not his own puny body and mind.

In Buddhism there is the idea that the Buddha has three bodies; his historical body, the universal body (dharmakaya) ,and a third body, which is sometimes called the body of joy.

I think that the third body is more accurately rendered as the True Teacher; we could call that person Sangha Buddha. 

Thus we have the historical Buddha, the Reality Buddha and the Sangha Buddha.

Those three Buddhas are not three separate jewels But the one Jewel, seen differently.

Almost all Zen practitioners are familiar with the legend of Bodhidharma: him arriving in a Southern port in China, having a bracing conversation with the emperor, going to Shaolin Monastery where he sat facing a wall for nine years.

In recent times historians have criticised that Legend as being well, a Legend. Many have doubted the existence of Bodhidharma as an actual person, particularly when so many things are attributed to him such as him being the creator of Kung Fu, Chinese Tantra and so on.

But in fact there was an Indian monk called Bodhidharma who did arrive in China from India in the sixth century. We know that because a researcher, Andy Ferguson, looked through the Chinese immigration records of that time and found him. Of course, that person isn’t really related to the legend at all. We know nothing very much about him. 

So who’s the real Bodhidharma? Is it that historical person about whom we know very little, or is it the Legend?

I say it’s the Legend.

Buddhism has an unusual view of the future. The future Buddha for instance, Maitreya, is existing now, albeit not in the human realm. In the Lotus Sutra the Buddha confidently predicts the future Buddhahood of many of the characters in that sutra.

The view that the past, present, and future are all existing now is called Eternalism.

It’s not simply the view of Mystics and religious figures. It was Einstein’s view. When one of Einstein’s friends died, Einstein said to his widow, “Oh, he’s just over that hill there.”

Yet there’s something about that metaphor of the whole of space-time being like a landscape that’s too static. 

More attractive -to me anyway -j is the view that the whole time-being is like a great ocean—dynamic, flowing in all directions. Time flows from the past to the present to the future, from the future to the past. 

It flows in all directions. The dynamic nature of our life flows in all directions and the dynamism of the whole universe is flowing through us.

In this sense, ‘Buddhas and Ancestors’ do not refer to historically located actual people.

They refer to this flow.
In that sense we are the future Buddhas and Ancestors for Bodhidharma. And although we cannot see them, the Buddhas and Ancestors of our future are flowing towards us, the unknown waters meeting the past waters of our karma, creating this miraculous vortex of now.

In classical China there was a widespread belief that prolonged meditation gave one miraculous powers: the ability to read other people’s minds; to see past lives; to do extraordinary things with the body’s energy; and so on.

Now we think that claims like that are ludicrous. Yet we imagine, equally ludicrously, that through Zazen we might cultivate compassion, wisdom, happiness, joy. 

Dogen, in talking about these claims—the ability to read minds and so on, referred to them as the small mystical powers. They were small because they were limited by person, place, circumstance, and time.

In contrast he talked about the great mystical power. By implication he is talking about Zazen.The famous example which he gave was fetching water and carrying firewood. In other words, the most mundane tasks we can imagine. Contemporary zen people often talk about washing the dishes. 

What does Dogen mean when he talks about the great mystical power?

Last week I was with my mother at the seaside in Edinburgh. We were sitting on the promenade. On the low sea wall was a little Indian girl, playing with her mother. The mother had produced two straws and both of them were delightedly waving around these straws like magicians wands. Waving them at the sea, the sky, the birds, the sand and so on.

The little girl was so happy, so new.

And I suddenly saw that that little girl was manifesting the great mystical power. 

And the reason why Dogen referred to the small mystical powers as small was that they simply involved changing the world.

And that the great mystical power is not changing the world, it is renewing the world.

Renewing the world and in this way, stopping, like the hand of another on a falling person, the collapse into nothingness.