Tag: Expression

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Kusen

126. Fully Expressing Buddhism

When we are sitting, practicing zazen, in this place, although we do not speak, we are not mute. We are fully expressing Buddhism.

Likewise when we speak from this place.

Likewise when we hear, from this place.

Expression, like love, is like a tiny bird flying from the heart. Much as we try, we cannot preserve it in pictures, or in words, or in stone.

We are not sheltering within a temple of words built long ago called Buddhism.

Indra’s net is the whole network of practitioners now and all times, extended everywhere, everywhere fully expressing illumination. If buddhist expression simply travelled from the past to now, it would illuminate nothing.

The past illuminates the present. The present illuminates the past. The present illuminates the present. Because of this, the stone bird flies everywhere.

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Kusen

87. Full Expression

In zazen, our normal strategies of repression and distraction don’t work. We have no choice: everything that arises expresses itself. It isn’t me expressing mySelf, and so, it is full expression. Likewise, although the activity of zazen is full and complete activity, it is not the activity of the self.

If we can understand zazen as activity and expression, then we can understand the world similarly

In this sense, zazen is the full expression of Buddhist activity

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Kusen

47. Dotoku

You are hanging by your teeth from a branch above a void. Someone asks you to express something about Buddhism. What do you do?

Dotoku – expression – consists of two Chinese characters: ‘do’ meaning ‘the way’ or ‘to say’ , and ‘toku’ – ‘to attain’ or ‘to be able’

So for Dogen, everything is expression: the branch is expressing itself, the void is expressing itself, the teeth are expressing themselves, the words are expressing themselves.

Implicit in an ordinary reading of the story is an assumption that the world is just the backdrop to the drama of us, when in fact the world is continually leaping out of itself.

As are you.