Tag: Kusen – oldest first

Master Dogen described the practice of zazen as being the [continuous process of] ‘dropping off body and mind’. 

It’s reasonably clear what he meant by dropping off mind, because he describes that process in quite a straightforward way in Genjokoan: in zazen, we allow all our experience to live fully, unconstrained by the assumption of ownership of this experience by the self.

That is, all the multifaceted aspects of our experience can be expressed, and they don’t have to be stuffed into the small jar of self. Sometimes that is expressed in spatial terms. So we’ll say it’s as if in zazen our awareness is like vast space, within which everything can freely appear, manifest itself entirely then go.

And if we do not give attention to the body, people can quite often have the notion that this sense of vast spaciousness, once developed, is the same as non-duality. That if zazen had a destination, this would be it.

Yet that’s incorrect, because it excludes the actual fabric of being; this body and all others.

Dropping off body is more difficult for us to understand, but it needn’t be. It is simply to forgo an unconscious yet pernicious idea we have of the body as being like an object within consciousness.

Or another way of putting it is as being like a pictured body within the mind: when someone asks us to pay attention to our left hand, do we sense it, or do we look at it?

Dropping off body is dropping off that conceptual sense of the body, so we can actually experience it as it is phenomenologically. And what we notice when we’re sitting in zazen is that very often we will experience our body as being like charged space.

So it’s there [as a ‘something’] but  not there. And there isn’t a clear boundary between body and world. There’s not a clear demarcation between this body and the body of all being.

And that is a much more immediate and natural sense of non-duality, which is beginningless and endless.

In Dogen’s Genjokoan, there’s the following highly evocative passage. (using the Okumura translation)

“Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot become firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the Dharma position of firewood and has its own before and after. Although before and after exist, past and future are cut off. Ash stays in the position of ash with its own before and after.”

The material phrase in this passage is ‘Dharma Position’, (in Japanese) “hōi”. What does Dogen mean by Dharma Position? We can gain some understanding if we consider our actual experience in zazen. 

Sometimes it’s as if we’re experiencing ourselves and the whole world as one piece.

There isn’t an inner and an outer. There is just oneness. Obviously, there’s differentiation. But there isn’t duality. And from that actual experience, we can see that in this moment nothing is excluded. In this moment, there are congregations of expressions and activities. There is this person sitting, there’s the birds singing, there is light falling through rain, there is dharma rain making our obstinacy more pliable. And we can see that, in this single moment, absolutely everything is included: all being, all moments.What’s meant by Dharma Position is an actual occurrence in the present moment, which we can think of as a moment of experience, a moment of activity, a moment of expression; something like that. 

But what we don’t think of it as is a moment of activity in or from or by a being which continues from past to present to future. The example, which Dogen is using about firewood and ash, says that in our unexamined normal way of thinking, there’s an underlying something [never specified] which is first a seed, and then a young tree, and then a mature tree and then firewood and then ash. Of course, whilst Dogen is using a poetic example he’s really talking about your ash: your birth, your life, your death.

And the suggestion is that although in one sense, to organise things, it’s convenient for us to think that there’s a continuity, which we achieve by fracturing experience into objects that persist over time, in a deeper sense and in a sense which is essential to enable us to understand the depth of our life, there isn’t a continuity of an underlying essence. So, as it were, all the moments, of this life, of your life, of everyone’s life are separate and distinct, but also connected with all being and all moments as moments. There’s not an underlying continuity of beings in time. Of course, each Dharma Position is part of the tapestry of being/time. There appears to be a contradiction, but there really isn’t. And Dogen is drawing out the implications of the perspective of ‘no-self’, which is the founding insight of Buddhism.

To reconfigure the world as not as cause and effect between ongoing entities but rather an ongoing miracle of expression, of exertion, of experience.