Glasgow Zen GroupA lot of Dogen’s dharma discourses in the Eihei Koroku consist of him quoting someone and then “after a pause” expressing something.
We imagine that he knows what he’s going to say. We imagine this because we always do. But we’re wrong. True expression has nothing to do with the karmic mind. It comes from a completely different position.
If we don’t understand the assumptions embedded in our language, it’s very difficult for us to understand buddhism.
One of the assumptions we have is that there shouldn’t be contradiction. Something is either one thing or another. Alive or dead. Active or passive. Good or bad. Fundamental or peripheral. High or low.
This leads us to misunderstand familiar buddhist metaphors like space, or mountains, or the ocean. We think that space is a metaphor for something – tranquillity, say – rather than the container and enabler of everything.
And not just buddhism. When 19th century European sanskrit scholars were translating tantric texts, they rendered ‘Supreme Being’ as ‘The Supreme Being’. It seems innocuous, but it’s not.
‘Supreme Being’ is an expression of being, not an entity. Just like the deepest depth of the ocean is part of the ocean. It’s not separate. Everything is working together in full expression. Like a real person. Not a corpse, tethered to a ghost.
Our practice is full of apparent opposites: delusion/enlightenment, true/false, dream/awakening, form/emptiness.
Silly people imagine that you throw away one and get the other. It’s not so.
These are all polarities, delineating the whole body of full dynamic expression. Without firewood, no fire. Without birds, no sky.
Therefore, this day, do not wish all the debris into nothingness. Do not grasp for false tranquillity.
This day, bring a great fire.
“Firewood becomes Ash. It doesn’t become firewood again. But don’t imagine that firewood is past and ash is future. Firewood exists in the living expression of the firewood. Ash exists in the living expression of ash. Each has its own past and future. Each cuts past and future.”
Dogen, Genjokoan
I first read these words in Dogen’s Genjokoan twenty seven years ago and they have stuck with me. But not in my throat.
On a superficial level, Dogen appears to be refuting the common idea in folk Buddhism of reincarnation. But what he really means to say is that firewood does not become ash. There is not an underlying ‘something’ which is first firewood then ash then something else. And there is not an underlying something in us which starts as a baby and becomes an adult which becomes an old person and then becomes a corpse.
So we are being invited to think differently. And so, to live and feel differently. Rather than thinking of being as taking place within time, we are invited to think of time and being as two polarities of existence. Sometimes it’s as if everything is momentary – all existence is an aspect of this moment. In other moments, time disappears into vast space, which feels eternal.
Duality is like a crack in the vessel of the heart; although we can’t see it, something precious is always seeping away.
This practice is not your individual practice carried on together with other people. We are practicing together.
That being so, you are not a great person, and never will be, no matter how much effort you expend. But you are part of a great person. And you always were.
Sometimes this person is teacher and student. Sometimes, this person is the whole network of practitioners, in all times. Sometimes the entire universe. Sometimes the tree in the garden.
When we come into the dojo, this person comes in with us. When we leave, this person leaves. Were practice to cease, this great person would fall into nothingness, leaving only bones and fragments.
But it will not.
The experience of most practitioners, until they have sat for quite a long time, is that they have very little moment to moment awareness of the body, except when they experience discomfort. Their awareness is primarily on the frozen mass of thought and emotion.
But after a while, we can understand practice, not as the liberation of the mind from thoughts, but as the liberation of the whole body from the mind, the relocation of the mind as an incidental activity within the whole body. Then the thoughts don’t matter.
When we sit, our aim is to manifest vast unitary awareness – unitary like space.
This awareness is not the property of the self yet the self appears within it, along with all beings and all phenomena.
If this awareness becomes fractured or partial, we return the attention to this body and this breath.
Not because this body and this breath is the subject or the object of zazen, but because this body and this breath is simply the most accessible to us, like a mountain in its upliftedness, feeling it is a part of the great Earth.
Dogen described zazen as ‘dropping off body and mind’. In other words, as thoughts, feelings and sensations arise, and we realise we’re holding on to them, we let them go. That’s it.
After a while, we may start to feel a remarkable steadiness, coupled with a sense of great spaciousness, like a mountain, like the sky.
And we may imagine that dropping off body and mind is just a preliminary to this state, which we can let go. And we might further imagine that thoughts, feelings and sensations are just momentary obstructions to this state, like clouds. But that would be a fundamental error.
Just as there is no original language, there is no primordial Emptiness. It does not underlie or precede form. Emptiness and form arrive together.
The clouds bring the sky.
What we need to understand about impermanence is that both time and being are momentary, and they aren’t separate.
That’s why Katagiri is able to say that each moment is the universe. Because it is the momentary wave of everything.
It’s hard to see this in our normal life. But we can see it in zazen. The wave of each moment, crashing against the cliff of practice.
We expect to see the Buddha, within us or behind us.
But no matter how hard we look, he is nowhere to be found.
Instead we see a fox of wisdom, a fox of piety, a fox of compassion, a fox of enlightenment and so on, for what seems 500 lifetimes.
We need to understand that this person is not a complete person, and never will be. This person is half a person. The momentary beingtime crashing against this half a person likewise is half a person.