Glasgow Zen GroupWe collect kusen from our teacher John Fraser. Kusen 口宣 means a teaching spoken from the mouth, some kusen are Koan commentary, or about Poetry or Sitting Instructions, the rest are numbered as general Kusen. This page is for all of these types of kusen. These are spoken towards the end of a zazen sitting. Several kusen have references and further information, as well as related videos, on the Latest page.
Chapter 43 of the Shobogenzo is The Moon. Dogen wrote this in 1243, in an outstanding period of creative brilliance.
At the start of the chapter, there’s a quote which, (in the Tanahashi version) reads, “Buddha’s true Dharma body, as it is, is Open Sky. In response to things, forms appear—thus is the moon in water”.
The passage comes from the Nirvana Sutra.
The version I’m more familiar with is “the Buddha’s True Dharma body is just like space. Manifesting form according to circumstances, it is like the moon in water.”
The Tanahashi version has rendered ‘space’ as ‘Open Sky’. That’s helpful because it enables us to unpick the first line to make it clearer that the Buddha’s True Dharma Body is reality—the whole of creation, not vacuity.
What does it mean to say that it’s like ‘space’?
‘Space’ is probably the most common metaphor in Buddhism. And it’s not just a metaphor, but a description of our real experience, and a bridge between the theoretical and the realisational.
What does it mean?
Because it’s the absence of discrete, concrete things, it suggests the absence of obstruction, of being hemmed in. It thus implies freedom, movement, expression and so forth.
It’s also very tied in, sometimes even synonymous, with ideas of emptiness. i.e. interdependence, transience, the relational nature of things and so on. Both ‘space’ and ‘emptiness’are linguistically closely related to ‘sky’, hence the Tanahashi translation.
The word which means sky in Japanese,‘Ku’, also means emptiness. All these words have close associations with ‘light’, and hence illumination, brightness, the eradication of ignorance, and so on.
But to understand this is difficult for us because we have an inherited Newtonian idea of space and time—both being a kind of fixed grid, within which things happen.
That’s not the sense in which space is used in this passage. Space isn’t like an empty container, rather it’s a supremely active container; like an ocean, or a body. Both active and undifferentiated: it extends everywhere, and is everywhere the same.
And, in a subtle way, space then becomes a way both of talking about emptiness, and making it something within our actual experience, rather than theoretical.
Because space extends everywhere, there’s nowhere that space is not.
Because space extends everywhere, it doesn’t disappear when an object appears in its ‘space’, as otherwise space would be continually disappearing and reappearing, which is nonsensical, and it can’t be displaced somewhere else, because there’s nowhere that space doesn’t reach. It’s not like me sitting in a full bath and displacing water onto the floor. Water can do this as it’s limited in space. But space isn’t. So the object is both itself, with its particular qualities, and also ‘space’: universal, connected, relational, interdependent. Form and emptiness, the particular and the universal, are thus mutually non obstructive, and we don’t make the error of falling into nihilism.
These closely linked words are a way of taking ‘emptiness’, which can often be thought of in quite conceptual terms and making it visceral and literal—particularly within the meditation space.
Although this might appear to be an abstract philosophical statement, it isn’t. It’s an expedient means to change our feeling and experiential state, particularly in zazen.
If you pay careful attention, you’ll realise that you are almost always carrying a proto image of yourself. That is, alongside your somatic e perience ( and often obscuring it), you’ll have a sense of what you look like, as if from an external perspective. It’s a very subtle form of dualism. We carry this sense around with us like a ghost of the self. If you allow yourself to experience your body as “exactly like space”, this ghost disappears, or is at least distanced. This is transformative, because the body of that ghost is self centred thinking. When the ghost leaves, that leaves too, along with its self referential babble.
The next line “manifesting form according to circumstance” seems to suggest interdependence and impermanence.
What we regard as ‘things’ arise subject to causes and conditions, and in due course they go, subject to causes and conditions. There’s no essence (or to use traditional language, ‘soul’ or ‘self’) within a thing which continues within the carapace of changing form.
Turning to the last line, Tanahashi’s translation may not be actually merited from the original text but it ties in very well with what Dogen goes on to see in the text, where he renders ‘like’ (nyoze) as ‘thusness’:
“Thusness is the moon in water”. The inconceivable actuality of reality is like the moon in water.
Yet when we hear the term ‘moon in water’ we might think of something which is an illusion. We might think of an ignorant person seeing a reflection of the moon in the water and thinking “oh that’s the moon” and diving in to try to grab the moon.
Sensible people know that the Moon is up in the sky. But they’re wrong. The ignorant person can’t grab the moon because we can’t grab anything, because everything is like space. The moon and the water and everything else are only there in a relational way.
I see the moon up in the sky because it’s reflected in the water of my eye; it’s reflected in the water of my mind. Without that relationalness, existence has no meaning. In a world emptied of everything else, the moon is neither in the sky or not.
The final line is thus reiterating the interconnectedness and the non-obstruction of everything. The image of the moon (the universal) in water does not obstruct or obscure the waves (the particular), and the waves do not shatter the moon.
We should understand that Buddhism isn’t a philosophy. It is the collective description, by multitudes of sincere practitioners, of their experience as they can best describe it, or for which they use skilful means to make possible that you might have the same.
The contemporary Zen teacher Taigen Dan Leighton described Zazen as “enactment ritual”.
It’s a very evocative phrase with many strands.
One is that when we sit Zazen with other people, even if there’s not many of us, a few of us, or five, or ten, even though we’re just sitting in a small, nondescript room,
through our sincere practice together, we are enacting a different world and a world re-envisioned.
Through compassion, a world where everything matters, everything has meaning and everything is part of a living whole. Where this ceaseless egoic activity which dims everyday life is put to one side.
Although ( in Master Sekito’s words) this room is small, it includes the entire world. The walls are fluid because we’re not restricted to what is physically here.
Everything is included.
In time, within our lived experience, the whole world is intimate with us, because when we re-emerge from our practice, the room comes with us.
Another strand:
When we’re practising together, the place of practice is the place of our actual experience. The room itself, the other practitioners themselves, and everything in the room occur within our practice. Not within our self, within our practice.
I’m sitting in this particular part of the room with all my ego, my karma, my psychological noise and so on, but the space of awareness is the whole room, and in that space of awareness and compassion everything else is also there—other beings, space, connection, relationship.
This room is both the metaphor and actuality of a practice which, although the self is there, it’s just something else going on. The self occurs within the practice and within the ‘room’ of awareness, not the other way around.
We chant the Heart Sutra after Zazen because the Heart Sutra is an expression and description of Zazen.
In the version we chant, the first sentence is usually translated “the Bodhisattva of compassion, practising the Perfection of Wisdom, clearly sees that the five skandhas are empty and thereby relieves all suffering”.
Chapter 2 of Shobogenzo is Dogen’s commentary on the Heart Sutra. The first sentence is his adaptation of that sentence, as follows: “Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva, while experiencing deeply the manifestation of prajna, clearly saw with the entire body that all five skandhas are empty” (Tanahashi translation).
In this adaptation Dogen is adding something and taking something away. What he’s adding is a reference to ‘the entire body’. What he’s taking away is the passage about relieving suffering.
The reference to ‘the entire body’ is to get us out of the idea that Zazen is a personal practice. The bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara, is identical to the entire/ whole body’, that is, with everything, with all beings.
His removal of ‘and thereby relieves all suffering’ is intended to get us out of a process view, of Buddhism generally and Zazen in particular. Namely, the idea that we do something (Zazen) and in that doing of something we realise something (emptiness) and that realisation causes something—the relieving of suffering.
The sentence now isn’t a sequence, it’s a description.
We can tell that because we can move the parts around and still maintain the same meaning. For example, we could say “the Bodhisattva of emptiness, experiencing deeply the manifestation of compassion, clearly saw with the entire body that all five skandhas are prajna”.
And Dogen does go on to do exactly this, identifying the five skandhas as being five pieces of Prajna.
Although the point might appear to be obscure, that assertion of Zazen as being a universal practice is very important. It’s not us practising, it is all of creation practising with this body within the entire body of all beings.
That’s not a sequential process.
It’s not “I was a deluded human being, then I made an effort and now I’m enlightened”. It’s immediate —it’s not developmental. It’s not progressive.
We see the whole of creation as compassion or as emptiness or as wisdom.
And that seeing pivots us. These apparently distinct terms —-compassion, Prajna, Emptiness, the entire body, are all synonyms for that which we can live but not name, expressed differently and seen and felt differently.
The first writing of Dogen that most of us are likely to come across is the Genjokoan chapter of the Shobogenzo.
I came across it over 30 years ago. I found it very rich, evocative and poetic.
There’s a reason for that. Dogen wrote it for a lay follower, so it’s different in style from his other writings, where his monks were his audience.
In the chapter, there’s a particular passage which has always affected me very much. It goes as follows: (this is the Tanahashi translation)
“Firewood becomes ash, and does not become firewood again. Yet, do not suppose that the ash is after and the firewood before. Understand that firewood abides in its condition as firewood, which fully includes before and after, while it is independent of before and after. Ash abides in its condition as ash, which fully includes before and after. Just as firewood does not become firewood again after it is ash, you do not return to birth after death”
The Nishijima translation is fairly similar:
”Firewood becomes ash; it can never go back to being firewood. Nevertheless, we should not take the view that ash is its future and firewood is its past. Remember, firewood abides in the place of firewood in the Dharma. It has a past and it has a future.
Although it has a past and a future, the past and the future are cut off. Ash exists in the place of ash in the Dharma; it has a past and has a future. The firewood, after becoming ash does not again become firewood. Similarly,human beings after death do not live again”
In trying to understand this passage, which I don’t think I have been very successful in doing, what seems most problematic is the third sentence.
The first sentence and the second sentence seem to be reasonably comprehensible. Dogen appears to be saying that although, in our karmic consciousness, firewood becomes ash, that’s not actually true, because there’s no underlying essence. At one point in time there is firewood and then at another point in time there is ash.
So those first two sentences, I think, are understandable.
The third sentence is harder. In the Tanahashi translation, that sentence reads;
“Understand that firewood abides in its condition as firewood, which fully includes before and after”.
That word ‘abides’ also occurs in the Nishijima translation.
For an English speaker, I think that that word ‘abides’ is unfortunate because, for me at least, it seems to suggest ‘endurance, continuity over time.
Somehow the firewood has become ash. Yet in some mystical sense it still exists; it’s still abiding somewhere. One of the reasons why we can make this (poetic yet false) interpretation, apart from the preceding sentences, is that it’s implicit in the word ‘abides’.
In some other transitions the same word is rendered as ‘remains’ which has an even stronger assumption of continuity.
The word in Japanese which is being translated as ‘abides’ means something like ‘dwell’ or ‘lives within’.
We can see how the translators produce the English word ‘abide’. But a better translation might be to talk about the ‘true home’. The ‘true home’ of firewood—what firewood actually is, is the expression of firewood.
The true essence of ash is the expression of ash. There’s not an underlying something which just happens to have a whole lot of qualities on top of it which change over time, so at one point it’s firewood, and later on it’s ash, yet the ‘something’ endures.
The manifestation, the expression of firewood, is firewood: there’s no continuity.
The reason why there’s not is because this miracle of creation is not in the form that we imagine it to be. In other words, it’s not a vast assembly of discrete yet related objects which arise, persist, change and disappear through time. Rather, it’s the total dynamic functioning and expression of this unseeable unsayable oneness from moment to moment. It’s like a body, not a warehouse.
In that sense it doesn’t make sense to talk about past and future because talking about past and future assumes an underlying continuity which in reality isn’t actually there, and a separation which isn’t there either.
But it’s very deeply ingrained in us, and necessary for us to function in society. I say “60 years ago I was a small child. In 10 years time I’ll be an old person”. Our language enables us to think that there’s an underlying Essence, even though there isn’t.
If we make that analysis, the other part of the sentence starts to make sense.
What about (in Tanahashi’s version) “firewood.. fully includes before and after; while it is independent of before and after”?
What I take from that is that from the perspective of the self there is a ‘me’; there is an ongoing me that is continuing and changing through time in a world of things which likewise are enduring and changing and perishing through time.
But if we don’t take the universe from this perspective of the Self, we can see that at every point the firewood, as it is, the ash as it is, is connected to everything. When the firewood is firewood, it is in a whole, alive, relational world. In a sense, each thing is the whole world.
We can see the world as uncountable beings, or as uncountable moments. If beings, it is as if we are seeing a billion threads, running parallel to each other. Where is the connection? In Uji, Dogen said Being is Time. And so, you can see yourself as this being, or as this moment. If this moment, then there is nowhere and no being which is not included in this moment. The countless moments and the countless beings are, as it were, threads running at right angles to each other. The loom of full dynamic functioning creates this miraculous fabric.
If that’s too obscure, consider your own life. After all Dogen isn’t really talking about firewood. He’s talking about you.
The carbon dioxide which left my lungs a moment ago hasn’t disappeared. It’s just disappeared from my perspective. The fleeting glance I gave someone, which I can’t remember, set off a ripple in that person, became part of that person’s changing dynamic expression, which also ripples out to others. Everything is like this. It is this miraculous fabric, infinitely dimensioned, shaken from all directions. Each moment of our life has an expression and significance which is invisible to us. And all these moments of our life are, as it were, having their own life, their own story, within the greater reality of all beings.
The most famous Koan in the literature is Joshu’s Mu Koan. Its best known form is Case 1 of the Gateless Gate which (in the Robert Aiken translation) is:
“A monk asked Joshu “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not? “
Joshu said “Mu.”
The koan also exists in a longer form in Case 18 of the earlier Book of Serenity, which is in two parts. Two monks ask Joshu the same question.
A monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”
Joshu said,”Yes.”
The monk said, “Since it has, why is it then in this skin bag?”
Joshu said, “Because he knows he deliberately transgresses.”
Another Monk asked Joshu, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”
Joshu said, “No.”
The monk said, “All sentient beings have Buddha nature, why does a dog not?”
Joshu said, “Because he still has karmic consciousness.”
In the Book of Serenity it’s the second question which is better known, so that’s the part which I’ll focus on.
A way of looking at these koans, which I think is a mistake, is that the teacher is wise and the student is ignorant and so they show the student being corrected by the teacher.
That perspective is very damaging for practitioners. It makes an effigy of the teachers, who become impossibly lofty, ahistorical figures, rather than flawed human beings sincerely engaged in practice.
A much better perspective is to re-see them as master and student together attempting to clarify aspects of this life.
That being said, what do we make of this koan?
First off there’s the question, “Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?”
It’s an odd question, because more than 100 years before this dialogue (if it ever was a historical dialogue) Chinese Buddhism had settled the issue of Buddha nature. There had been an argument whether all beings had Buddha nature or if some beings did not. It was resolved in favour of the more generous interpretation—that all beings had Buddha nature.
So in a way, the question is disingenuous.
Also the Chinese is terse, so it’s not clear from the Chinese if the monk is referring to an objective dog or if he’s referring to himself—does this dog have Buddha nature? The answer that Joshu gives, is either (in the Cleary translation of the Book of Serenity), ‘No’ or ‘Mu’.
‘No’ is not an accurate translation. Chinese and Japanese have three options to a question whereas we have only two. Both obviously have yes & no but they have a third option. In Chinese that third option is ‘Mu’ and in Japanese that third option is ‘hi’, as in ‘hishiryo’.
‘Mu’ is not the direct negative. It means something like —that’s not it or it’s different from that.
It tends to indicate some conceptual confusion with the question. For example if someone were to ask, “is the mountain flat?” then the answer would be ’no’ but if the question was, “is the mountain an introvert?”, the answer would be ‘Mu’ because the questioner misunderstood the nature of mountains, which don’t have psychological characteristics. Joshu’s answer of Mu to the monk’s (apparent) question indicates that there’s a conceptual confusion.
In the question, I think the monk isn’t ignorant; he’s inviting Joshu to confirm that there’s a common conceptual confusion with Buddha Nature. The question is brought out in the second half of the exchange when the monk asks his supplementary question, “.. all beings have Buddha nature, why doesn’t a dog have Buddha nature?”.
The Chinese is more terse than the translation; it’s simply ‘karmic nature.’
I think this exchange isn’t about whether the dog has karmic nature in place of Buddha nature or that the dog (or monk) has two Natures, that are somehow contesting the existential space of the dog, but rather that the phrasing of the initial question (intentionally) has an error in it.
That error is that the world is made up of dogs and human beings and walls and all the rest of it. Each of which has Buddha nature. It’s an individual quality, like height, or dog-ness.
With the Buddha Eye, all of existence is seen as a dynamic, interdependent and vivid whole.
It’s our karmic nature which splits up the world for us into dogs and human beings and so on.
The monk is intentionally asking Aunt Sally questions to clarify that Buddha nature is not a personal quality and by implication, that Enlightenment is not a personal quality either. We go astray when we take the world as it presents itself to our karmic consciousness. Or, if you prefer a more familiar language, the world as it presents itself to our socially and historically conditioned self.
We mistake those parts for reality and then attempt to impose qualities on them. Like asking how much the fat man in a dream weighs.
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.
A very common problem in Zazen, particularly for beginners, is apparent fatigue. You often see people sitting, their heads, which feel heavy, gradually drooping forward, then they notice it and come out of it with a startle. Then they often stick their chest out and lift their head in a rather unrelaxed, mock heroic posture. And then you can see them gradually collapsing again like a slow motion souffle, then taking up the heroic position again; up and down, like an accordion, often for the length of their sitting.
What’s helpful for fatigue in Zazen is to think of it in a different way. It’s not really about fatigue but about having a spine that’s insufficiently activated. If it were really about fatigue, the practitioner would be exhausted before and after Zazen, and they hardly ever are.
Rather than trying to make yourself do something with your mind, whose imperative is to urgently resume the ‘correct’ posture without anyone noticing, it’s much better to make sure that your pelvis is in the right position; that your weight is going down through your sit bones. Then, just very, very finely and slowly, rock backwards and forwards on your sit bones.
Going from the back of your sit bones to the middle through the front very slowly, minutely.
As you’re doing that, on the in-breath you’re pushing down with the pelvic floor at the perineum, and on the out- breath you’re allowing the spine to lengthen. You’re not pushing up the top of the head, you’re not stretching the back of the neck, you’re just allowing the spine to lengthen and be itself, like a young, unencumbered tree.
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.