Category: Kusen

Categories
Kusen

Master Dogen’s dharma discourse number 441.

“Having questions and answers, we smear everything with shit and piss. Not having questions and answers, thunder and lightning crash. The great Earth in ten directions is leveled and all of space is torn open, not allowed to enter from outside, not allowed to leave from inside.

A gavel strikes the sounding block and the ten thousand affairs are completed.

At such a time how is it?

(After a pause, Dogen said) time and again everything exists within a painting. Even allowing for what falls apart snow falls at midnight.”

Master Dogen’s dharma discourse number 441.

This discourse, delivered in the last part of his life, in all its vigour and iconoclasm seems quintessentially Dogen, but in fact, prior to the pause, Dogen is directly quoting the words of his Master, Tendo Nyojo.

By this time his master had been dead for more than a decade and he had not seen him for more than 15 years.

Are the words Nyojo’s or Dogen’s, both, or neither?

It is the responsibility of the teacher to teach with great vigour, and to do so for the rest of their days.

Yet the personal vigour of a teacher – even a great teacher like Dogen – is puny. Yet it is as if sometimes the entire lineage – not just the visible lineage, but the lineage of all times – and the entire universe seen and unseen is all congregated around this person, and given voice.

Whether you believe it or not, you are like this, I am like this and, to live without doubt, it is necessary only once.

Categories
Kusen

Dogen’s Dharma Hall Discourse 463 [adapted]

Dogen’s Dharma Hall Discourse 463 [adapted]

Dropping off body and mind; dropping off this skin, flesh, bones and marrow; dropping off this vivid waterfall of experience: How can this be you? How can this be other?

Breaking into a smile, nothing has ever been separated.

(after a pause)

In other days, we have mapped out this entire miraculous world, but this day, we are as innocent as children singing

Categories
Kusen

Issho Fujita on posture

Please read a brilliant essay by Issho Fujita on posture from Dharma Eye.

Categories
Kusen

247. Within a zen shaped annexe

In the Courtyard of Master Joshu’s temple was a cypress tree. One day, a monk asked Joshu

“Does the cypress tree have Buddha nature?”

Joshu replied, “It does”

The monk asked, “When does it acquire Buddha nature?”

Joshu said, “ When the sky falls to the ground”

The inclination is to interpret his answer as something like this:

Buddha nature isn’t an attribute that can be acquired by individual things, or people. It is a mythopoetic way of describing the dynamic wholeness of all being.
So, it’s not that you, or anyone else, has Buddha nature. Rather, you and everything else are Buddha nature. In Joshu’s answer, “sky” means emptiness, so what Joshu is pointing to is different from an abstract understanding (and hence separation) of form and emptiness. Rather, it is the real experience of both, interwoven in the fabric of full dynamic functioning, or dependent origination, or Buddha nature.

But I think an interpretation like this falls into a classic zen error. We purport to debunk and leave the house of Buddhist theory, but actually never leave, remaining within a weird zen shaped annexe, perhaps called “concrete reality”, perhaps called something else.

We can’t understand practice through theory, but we can understand and explain theory through practice. But without theory, we would never start practice. But it’s not a catch 22, it’s a spiral.

In the exchange, when is the “When”?

When we practice. In your actual experience, when you are sitting, isn’t it as if your face, your head, your torso are hanging in space? And isn’t it as if your pelvis, your legs, your feet are part of the great ground? And isn’t this the sky falling to the ground? The ground falling to the sky?

Categories
Kusen

246. This great miracle

Our practice does not start from a position of lack. We do not need to complete or perfect anything. We are not on a journey. We are not spiritual warriors.

Rather, we are like a child filled with wonder. We are like an old person, on the point of death, grateful to have lived, picturing the deep interweaving of all things, picturing – eyeless – the great miracle.

This great miracle is always present, like a mother. Sometimes she embraces me, and sometimes she lets me be. But whenever I drop the weight of my head, she lifts me up.

Categories
Kusen

245. The self of all things

“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.

Categories
Kusen

244. A fire engulfing your head

Dogen said that we should practice zazen like a person trying to extinguish a fire engulfing their head.

A lazy or stupid teacher might parrot this at his unfortunate students. I certainly have. The intention is to impart a sense of urgency. But it’s false. We need to pay attention to the actual words, the actual image.

First, why is it engulfing only the head? Because it is the fire of the self. It can’t be extinguished by the puny efforts of the self.

Second, the person is trying. He doesn’t succeed. There isn’t an end point. It is a continual effort. It is dropping off body and mind.

Third, the effort is made by the vigorous activity of the body. But whose body?

Which person? The person of all being. The body of all things.

It is not your effort, because that would be feeble. It is the effort of the whole Universe, like the pouring of a vast and endless river through an infinity of dharma gates.

Categories
Kusen

243. Not the wind of ignorance

The Moon In Water

Originated as a description of the mind we should aim for while meditating.

Still water perfectly reflects the moon. A still mind perfectly reflects reality.

But, when the wind of ignorance starts to blow, creating thought waves, the reflection is lost.

But for Dogen, the wind wasn’t the wind of ignorance, it was the wind of interdependence. And that interdependence was fully expressing itself in the dynamic interplay of wind, water, space and moonlight. The moon wasn’t up in the far sky, it was in the water.

It’s hard to overstate how so entirely different this is.

Categories
Kusen

242. The Robe Verse

The kesa and rakusu are symbols of interdependence, and its reality.

Before we put the rakusu or kesa on, we place it on top of our heads and chant the Kesa Sutra.

So, as it were, we are placing interdependence above the self.

The first line of the sutra has the character ‘datsu’, the same datsu within Dogen’s description of zazen: shinjin datsuraku, dropping off body and mind. That is, dropping off, from moment to moment, the belief that this experience is my experience.

So we are putting something on, interdependence, and dropping something off, our separateness.

That being so, our focus when we sit is not to bring anything about, or exclude anything, but to welcome everything. Because we are not just the symbol of interdependence, but the reality

which is not something which happens to us, or something we see, but what we are.

Categories
Kusen

241. The world will not fall into nothingness

The dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham said dance is the fleeting moment of feeling totally alive.

But you feeling totally alive is the small miracle. Experiencing the great fabric of all things as totally alive is the great miracle.

Allowing all this experience to flood through you: like light, undiminished by love, or by hate, or by comparison or by analysis. The great miracle is like a vast clear river which leaves no residue. Great, because although manifested fleetingly, even so the world will not fall into nothingness.