Tag: Dogen

Dogen said that the five skandhas (form, sensation, perception, mental formation, consciousness) are five pieces of Prajna; before thinking.

It is easier to see with the first two.

With the first skandha, when we sit, we don’t think, I am a man, I am a woman, this is a wall and suchlike, we just sit, right in the middle of our raw experience.

Likewise with sensation. We just feel what is there. We don’t label it.

With perception and mental formation, it’s a little harder to see Dogen’s point, but it’s very important that we do.

We just need to see the incessant urge to understand this flood of experience. This constant ‘What is this?’

It is as if we are in a room with a storyteller. The point is not to get caught up in the stories, nor to speculate if they’re true, nor to get annoyed because they’re not, but just to see the aliveness of the storyteller and, seeing this, the aliveness of everything.

Master Dogen said that Zazen is the dharma gate of ease and joy.

To understand what he meant we need to consider the fundamental Buddhist insight that we suffer because we believe there is a self and that there are things which belong to the self. And because we think that in our ordinary life we constellate our experience around this. Like wrapping a bandage round and round a non-existent head.

Dogen also said that Zazen is casting off body and mind, and one of the things he specifically means is that when we sit, we cast off this sense of me and mine. So experience is unwound, fills everywhere. And we can understand that suffering is not inevitable.

In Bendowa, Master Dogen is asked a series of questions.

In answer four, he appears to make a naive statement about the relationship between theory and practice. In effect, he says we shouldn’t concern ourselves about the superiority or inferiority of teachings, but should only concern ourselves with whether practice is authentic or not.

But how is that possible? Don’t we necessarily have to have some idea of what practice is about before we practice?

We can begin to grapple with the statement if we consider two things: the nature of faith in buddhism and the difference between living and dead language.

First, faith. Following Stephen Batchelor, I would say that faith isn’t about making a series of propositions which one believes, but rather that faith is the courage to bracket all our beliefs, put them to one side, and try as best we can to give ourselves to our experience. That’s why words like ‘inconceivable’ are used.

It doesn’t mean that the truths of buddhism are very hard to understand, it means that the spectrum of experience which is being pointed at is outside the jurisdiction of the mind, and its tendency to ceaselessly fabricate. It is pra-jna, pre knowing, prior to conceptualisation. Our sincere effort to language truth is truth, which cannot be caught, only felt.

Second, language. I would say that dead language is the mind trying to grasp the world and itself conceptually, from the standpoint of ‘me’. Because it proceeds from ‘me’, the world is ‘myriad things’; nouns, not verbs. States, not expressions. Imagining Nirvana as a place or state we can reach and remain, rather than an in the moment not-doing.

In living language, the primary dichotomy of self and world is broken, since language – and everything else – is an aspect of dependent origination, which in turn is seen as dynamic expression stepping forward and backward, not a structure of cause and effect. Each expression, each this-now occupies its own dharma position, and at the same time, is the whole of dependent origination, and because of this, the expressive power of each this-now is infinite. One facet of that expressive power is language.

So, in authentic practice in the sense meant by Dogen, although we are drawn to practice by possibly superficial and unexamined notions of what practice is, if we practice from the position of faith, not us but practice, speaks.

The Buddha’s true dharma body is just like space;

Manifesting its form according to circumstances,

it is like the moon in water

The image of the moon in water is one of the most familiar in Buddhism. The moon is Buddha, the water is the mind. When the water is tranquil, the moon is reflected perfectly.

It’s a dualistic image, obviously, and Dogen radicalises it by saying that the moon’s light is equally reflected, however the water is. What is important is not the form of the moon, but its expression. It illuminates the water. It illuminates the clouds. It illuminates the heavens. It illuminates itself. And apart from this illumination, there is no moon.

In the masterly Tsuki, Dogen revitalises the image as the active inter penetrating expressing everything.

The first line of the poem says something similar, but in a different way. When we come into the dojo and take our place, the space that was there before doesn’t disappear. It isn’t displaced elsewhere. Buddha doesn’t appear and the person vanishes. It isn’t like that. Both arise together.

We are space and person. Buddha and karmic existence. Particular and universal.

In the Shōbōgenzō chapter, Jinzu, Dogen talks about mystical powers.

At his time, many people thought that through the practice of Zazen, practitioners acquired mystical powers, such as the ability to see into past lives, to change form, and so forth.

The hope of personal enlightenment is a residue of this sort of thinking. But we need to understand that whatever can be grasped makes us a fist.

For Dogen, these mystical powers were the small mystical powers, not the great mystical power.

So what is the great mystical power?

For him, it was chopping firewood and carrying water. In other words, ordinary activity. The great miracle that there is something, not nothing.

Zenki is the great mystical power

Gratitude, love, is the great mystical power

Unclenching the fist of the mind is the great mystical power

The world and the heart leaping out of each other. The Great Mystical Power.

Master Dogen said:

The path of all buddhas and ancestors arises before the first forms emerge.

So, the Buddhist state arises prior to the creation of the world. It is an active, dynamic state which is there before we create a world of light and dark, good and bad, me and you. It is a state prior to language and prior to concepts.

Much of our life is us putting layers onto our natural momentary feeling state; layers of thought, layers of emotion. And these layers attempt to answer the question we always put to this feeling state: what is this, and why now?

Because when we meditate we try and put this tendency to one side, meditation is an affirmation of the feeling state, and this simple feeling state is the way.

In the Fukanzazengi, Dogen says that the secret of zazen is non-thinking [hishiryo]. This is neither thinking [shiryo] nor not thinking [fushiryo].

By way of comparison, we can examine non doing. In the Chinese tradition there is wu wei, the watercourse way. Just as the water will respond appropriately to its environment, in non-doing we act appropriate to our actual situation, and that acting comes from a position of non-dualism, not ego. It is spontaneous fitting action.

Applying that to non thinking, we can envisage a state whereby thought is liberated from thought, language is liberated from language and the world, liberated from both, becomes vivid and alive. And this liberated thought and liberated world are no longer separate.