Tag Archives: Dogen

The Harbor and the Weir

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There’s something strange about Zen’s 10th Grave Precept — the one against “defaming the Three Treasures” of the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.

Why would anyone want to maliciously slander the Three Treasures?  The very thought  of it reminds me of the Stephen King protagonist who, concerned about the paradoxes inherent in time travel, asks “what if you went back and killed your own grandfather?” Another character replies, “Why the fuck would you do that?”

Exactly.

It’s not as if the Three Treasures need anyone’s protection. You can defame “2+2=4” all day long up and down the block, but “2+2” still equals “4”.  You can defame the Dharma all you want, but it remains unstained — how can you defame mindfulness or compassion?

The 10th Precept is often accompanied by two Japanese quotes (the translation is credited to Robert Aitken Roshi and his Diamond Sangha).

The first quote is attributed to Bodhidharma:

“Self-nature is subtle and mysterious. In the realm of the One, not holding nihilistic concepts of ordinary beings and sages is called the Precept of Not Defaming the Three Treasures.”

The Bodhidharma quote opens up the question of identity.  What is our true nature (self-nature) and what is the nature of other beings (ordinary beings and sages)?  What is our nature when seen through the lens of the absolute (the realm of the one)?  Bodhidharma’s quote points to both our mutual co-participation in the fabric of reality and our potential for awakening. When we fail to see how we are all an integral part of the whole, when we give up on anyone’s potential for awakening, we are defaming the Three Treasures — the Buddha (our potential for awakening) the dharma (the interconnectedness and contingent nature of all things) and the sangha (our participation in the community of awakening beings).

The other quote is undoubtedly Dogen’s:

“The teisho of the actual body is the harbor and the weir. This is the most important thing in the world. Its virtue finds its home in the ocean of essential nature. It is beyond explanation. We just accept it with respect and gratitude.”

A teisho is a dharma talk given by a Zen teacher.  In this case, the dharma talk in question is not a verbal one –  and it’s not given by a Zen teacher.  It’s the teaching we may receive at any moment from the actual body.  Our actual body is this body right here and now, this lived body as we experience and act through it  –  but it’s not just these five or six feet of skin, bones, muscles, sinews, and internal organs.  Our body is an integral part of all that is, including not only the live feel of movement and emotion, but birdsong, wheat fields, trees, and stars.  Everything is teaching us all the time.   Theologians sometimes question why God spoke to the prophets but no longer speaks to us  — but Dogen’s actual body never shuts up.  Let those who have ears hear.  This actual body, the dharmakaya, is our safe home (a harbor for boats, a weir for fish).  Dogen tells us this living teaching of the universe is the most important thing in the world.  Listen!  Feel!  See!  This teaching is beyond words — there’s no explanation we can give.

But what does Dogen’s quote have to do with not defaming the Three Treasures?

The answer lies in the line “We just accept it with respect and gratitude.”  Gratitude and respect are our natural responses when we listen openly to life.  We ourselves become filled with life — we feel ourselves unfold and flow.  This is grace.  In the presence of gratitude and respect, defamation doesn’t even exist as a possibility.  Defamation is the act of a dried-out husk — cynical, cut-off, despising, ungracious — not a being living each moment in harmony and awareness. In this sense, the 10th Precept is not a mere admonition to avoid slander — it’s an invitation to receive grace — to awaken, to open, to be aware, to listen with one’s whole being to the ongoing teisho of life.

As Dogen says, this is the most important thing in the world.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Five Practices

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Buddhism has a thing for numbered lists:  Two Truths.  Three Marks of Existence.   Four Foundations of Mindfulness.  Five Precepts.  Six Paramitas.  Seven Factors of Enlightenment.   The Eightfold Noble Path. Twelve links of Dependent Origination. Thirty-two Marks of the Buddha. Fifty-one Mental Factors.  Fifty-two Stages of the Bodhisattva Path.  There’s a lot of stuff to remember and the lists are mnemonic devices that help keep everything straight.

Buddhist practice can be endlessly complicated.  Some people like things with more details, more rules, more rituals, more practices, complex visualizations.  If you are one of them, there is a Buddhism that is just right for you.  There are 84,000 different Dharma doors.

Not me.  I like things simple.  My favorite ice cream is plain vanilla.

My practice is very simple.  My numbered list contains only Five Practices:

  1. Be Present
  2. Be Open-Hearted
  3. Show Respect
  4. Have Courage
  5. Let Go

Five is as much as I can wrap my head around.  If I stick with these five there is more than enough to keep me busy.

1) Being Present — The practice of Being Present involves mindfulness, both in dedicated sitting practice and in daily life.  It also involves a commitment to whole-heartedness — if you are going to do something, do it all the way with your whole being.  It also means showing up — be there to do what is needed — don’t evade responsibility for doing what has to be decided or done.

2) Be Open-Hearted — Open-Heartedness is the practice of commitment to the way of compassion, lovingkindness, empathy, tolerance and forgiveness.  It is the practice of accepting people the way they are, no matter how different or deficient they may be.  That doesn’t mean that you accept or approve of everything others do, and it doesn’t mean you don’t protect yourself from the harmful action of others.  It just means that you keep them in the category of “one of us.”  All beings are “one of us,”  no matter how much they might seem otherwise.  We say, in the metta chant, sabe satta, “whatever beings there are.”  We wish them happiness and freedom from suffering.  Compassion and kindness are not just emotions to be cultivated as mental states.  They involve our compassionate and loving activity in the world.

3) Show Respect — All things are interconnected.  Who we are, our very life and existence, is dependent on the interdependent cooperation of all things.  Can we show appreciation, gratitude, and respect for all things?  This means not only bowing to and respecting all beings, including animals and plants.  It means appreciating and caring for all things that come into our little circle of life. It means keeping air and water clear and unpolluted.  It means appreciating and respecting the earth, and being a good steward.  It means raising animals humanely and growing crops without toxins.  It means keeping our living space orderly and clean.  It means taking care of the things we own.  It means respecting and caring for other people’s belongings.  We bow deeply to all.

4) Have Courage –  Don’t live your life out of fear, but live your life out of your convictions.  Don’t be afraid to take a stand, to express a conviction.  Don’t be afraid to love.  Don’t be afraid to do what wisdom tells you needs to be done.  This doesn’t mean that you should be in other people’s faces or take foolhardy risks.  It just means that your existence should be life-affirming, not fear-based and avoidant.

5) Let Go — No one died and left you in charge of things.  The world is not yours to control.  Our practice is one of mindfulness, open-heartedness, respectfulness and courage.  That doesn’t mean that everything we do turns out right, the way we had hoped and expected.  It doesn’t mean that others always reward us or appreciate us for what we do.  It doesn’t mean we get what we want.  We still get old, and sick, and die.  All relationships, even the one’s we care about most, even the good ones, all end eventually.  If all goes well they end with our death or theirs, if all doesn’t go well, they end in acrimony.  Nothing we like and want to hold onto remains constant.  Change, entropy, habituation, and cycles of decline, transformation, and rebirth govern the multiverse.  Our practice is a continual one of letting go, non-clinging, and acceptance, over and over.  Just like when we do our sitting practice, the practice is one of continual letting go moment by moment.  Letting go of our demands on the moment — how this moment ought to be — and accepting it just the way it is.

Do I personally embody these practices in my own life?  No.  They are horizons to be aimed at, not accomplishments to be attained.  The practice-life never ends.  We have to recommit to it moment by moment.  We continually fall short of our practice goals, notice when we have fallen short, and recommit again, until we forget again.  This is our human life.

Will these practices make you Enlightened?  They haven’t made me Enlightened.  But engaging in these practices is enlightened activity.  When we engage in these practices all things express Buddha nature through us.

“Grass, trees, and lands are all embraced by this activity and together are radiant and endlessly express the inconceivable, profound Dharma. Grass, trees, fences, and walls bring forth the Teachings for all beings, usual people as well as sages. And they in accord extend this Dharma for the sake of grass, trees, fences, and walls. Thus, the realm of self-Awakening and Awakening others is fundamentally endowed with realization lacking nothing, and realization itself is actualized ceaselessly.”  — from Dogen’s Bendowa [1]

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  1. [1] translated by Anzan Hoshin Roshi and Yasuda Joshu Dainen Roshi ↩

Thanksgiving 2010

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“Monks, I will teach you the level of a person of no integrity and the level of a person of integrity. Listen & pay close attention. I will speak.”

“As you say, lord,” the monks responded.

The Blessed One said, “Now what is the level of a person of no integrity? A person of no integrity is ungrateful & unthankful. This ingratitude, this lack of thankfulness, is advocated by rude people. It is entirely on the level of people of no integrity. A person of integrity is grateful & thankful. This gratitude, this thankfulness, is advocated by civil people. It is entirely on the level of people of integrity  -  Kataññu Sutta

Gratitude is an antidote for the poisons of greed, jealousy, resentment, and grief.  When we are grateful we do not wish for more than we have, but appreciate that which is already present in our lives.  We do not chafe at the good fortune of others, or resent or mourn that which is missed, lost, gone, or never had.  The desire for more can be boundless and endless.  There is always one more thing to want.

Acceptance and gratitude are feelings that can occur spontaneously, but they are also attitudes that can be cultivated.  The more space we make for them in our lives, the more we practice them, the less room there is for mental poisons to take root.

Can we be grateful in this moment that we have this human life to cultivate and develop?  That we live in a time and place where we can hear and study the dharma?  Can we be grateful for the earth that holds us up, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food that nourishes us?   Can we be grateful for the presence in our lives of people who love us, and people that we love?  Can we be grateful that, whatever ailments afflict us, we are still able to breathe and think and move?   Can we be grateful that, whatever financial reverses we may have suffered, we still have shelter, clothing, and food to eat?  Can we be grateful for our parents who gave us life and kept us alive through childhood, who fed and clothed us, who cared for us when we were ill?

As you try to cultivate gratitude for what is present, do resistances arise?  The “yes, buts” and “if onlys?”  Yes, but my parents were self-absorbed, judgmental, controlling… If only I were thinner, richer, healthier, younger… Let the resistances arise, observing them without pushing them aside, without amplification, without judgment.  Do they persist or dissolve?  What’s possible in this very moment?

What’s it like to be grateful when you have cancer?  When you are incarcerated?  When you are unemployed?   Can we be grateful and appreciative no matter what?  In practice we “open the hand of thought” and let the story line become permeable, transparent.   We let the world shine through.

“Continuous practice, day after day, is the most appropriate way of expressing gratitude. This means that you practice continuously, without wasting a single day of your life, without using it for your own sake. Why is it so? Your life is a fortunate outcome of the continuous practice of the past. You should express your gratitude immediately.”  – Dogen (Kazuako Tanahashi, trans.)

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On Reading Dōgen in Translation

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I’ve been reading Dōgen’s Genjōkōan with Shohaku Okumura [1] as my guide.  Dōgen is my perennial favorite Buddhist writer.  In fact, my Buddhist BFF.  I return to him again and again year after year.  I only wish I understood a word that he wrote.

“Think of not-thinking. How do you think of not-thinking? Non-thinking. This in itself is the essential art of zazen” -Dōgen

Dōgen is, of course, the master of using language to subvert language and I’m reading him in English when he wrote in archaic Japanese.  His writings are an ongoing conversation with a stream of Sino-Japanese ancestors and contemporaries.  I’ve only barely dipped my toes in that stream.  (Most of my Buddhist study has been in the Pali tradition with excursions into later Indian writers like Nagarjuna and Shantideva.)

So I’ve employed Shohaku Okumura as my somewhat trusty guide.  Okumura is a Sōtō Zen priest and Dharma successor to the late Kōshō Uchiyama Roshi.  Okumura has spent a lifetime struggling with Dōgen.  He’s translated many of Dōgen’s essential works into English as well as contributed to the scholarly Dōgen literature.  Okumura was born in Osaka and grew up, studied, and enrobed in Japan, but he has also lived in Massachusetts, San Francisco, and Minneapolis.  He currently resides in Bloomington, Indiana where he is the founding teacher at the Sanshin Zen Community.

I like Okumura as my guide, in part because he shares my prejudices.  For example, when it comes to the issue of rebirth, Okumura writes:

“Personally I don’t believe in literal rebirth, yet I don’t deny its existence either.  I have no basis for believing in or denying literal rebirth; the only thing I can say with surety is ‘I don’t know.’”

A man after my own heart!  But then, Okumura may go too far when he attributes the same view to Dōgen:

“People often ask me, ‘What is the Sōtō Zen view of rebirth?’ This is a difficult question because Dōgen Zenji, I believe, advocates ‘not knowing’ in this case.”

Did Dōgen really recommend not-knowing in this case?  Or is Okumura perplexed because Dōgen held contradictory views that are impossible to reconcile?  (For example, the thorny, unresolvable issue of “if there is nothing but the five skandhas, what gets reborn?”)  Don’t ask me.  I don’t know.

But here’s the interesting point:  I’m a twenty-first century American reading an English translation of an untranslatable thirteenth-century Japanese text by a twenty-first century translator born in a Japan altered by an American occupation, and teaching in a United States altered by contact with Japanese culture.  It’s like trying to read Dōgen in a funhouse mirror.  Dōgen’s texts, like all compound phenonema, are empty of fixed self. They are living documents endlessly open to interpretation and reinterpretation even as we attempt to fathom their original meaning.

A project like this is fraught with difficulty!  Who can say with any certainty what Dōgen meant when he wrote what he wrote?  We view Dōgen through complex prisms of time and culture, condemned to reading them through the perspective of our unique personal experience and with our necessarily limited knowledge of the vast, boundless 2,500 year-long Buddhist dialogue.  We bring our own intentions to Dōgen’s texts; we read him for our own reasons.  We can only do our best. It’s a miracle he can still speak to us at all!  But speak he does.

Okumura uses his own life experience and zazen practice to help unlock the meaning of Dōgen’s texts.  It’s another reason why I like him as my guide.  Because Dōgen is all about living and doing rather than talking and thinking. Right?

In fact, think not-thinking.

“There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped.  We endlessly express this ungraspable trace of realization.”  -Dōgen


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  1. [1] Okumura, S. (2010). Realizing Genjōkōan: The Key to Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, Wisdom: Somerville, MA. ↩

Mindfulness is Intimate Attention

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“Enlightenment is intimacy with all things.” –Dogen Zenji

There are two types of attention.

One is a kind of critical scrutiny.  It’s the kind of attention in which we set ourselves up to be judges rating and evaluating some aspect of our behaving, thinking, or experiencing.  We watch ourselves in a distant and detached way like scientists observing a specimen under the microscope.  We make our behavior the focus of a series of inquiries:  “Why did I do that?” “What happened in my past that caused me to establish such-and-such a pattern?” None of this really helps us much: it distances us from life rather than joining us to it.  It leads to a proliferation of thinking rather than dropping us into a deeper space of awareness.

The other kind of attention involves genuine contact with what is being attended to.  It’s an empathic attunement to our own experiencing; an open listening without judgment; an intimacy with our own stream of consciousness.  Meditation brings this open, noncritical, intimate listening, seeing, and feeling back to our life again and again.

The Pali word for this kind of attention is sati (mindfulness).  Mindfulness is a bare-bones attention that lightly touches its object in an intimate way.  It is free from judging, comparing, and thinking.  It notices both sensations and the mind’s emotional, cognitive, and somatic reactions to them.  It is for and against nothing.  It doesn’t take sides or wish for things to be different from the way they are.

Mindfulness involves adopting an intentional stance vis-à-vis one’s own experiencing.  That stance can best be described as both a “letting go” and a “letting be.”  When we are mindful we let go of aspirations to achieve any particular outcome.  We temporarily suspend acting on our desires to prolong or avoid experiences and our tendency to label experiences as either “good” or “bad.”  We let experiences be.  We give them space and let them breathe. We let them speak for themselves.  Experiences manifest without effort on our part, and subside without effort on our part.

When we are mindful we don’t allow experiences to take us for a ride, however.  We sit like a mountain, intimately experiencing phenomena blossom, persist, and fade.

When we are mindful, we are not observing the world.  The world is manifesting through us.

A bird is singing in a tree.  Where is the birdsong?  In the tree?  In the vibrating air molecules?  In our ears?  In our auditory cortex?  In our minds?  In the bird’s mind?

When we are mindful we co-participate with all things as they co-arise in the world/mind.  We are an integral part of the seamless web of being.   How could it be otherwise?

“Conveying oneself towards all things to carry out practice-enlightenment is delusion.  All things coming and carrying out practice-enlightenment through the self is realization.” -  Dogen Zenji

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Don’t Side With Yourself

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Bankei, the seventeenth century Zen master, had this to say: “Don’t side with yourself.” By this he meant don’t give your own wants and desires such importance; don’t reinforce your own sense of being a separate, unchanging self; don’t be selfish; don’t take sides. The Buddhist universe doesn’t have sides or edges.   It doesn’t have an inside or an outside. The universe doesn’t take sides.  It doesn’t side with the east wind; it doesn’t side with the west wind.  It doesn’t prefer sunny days to thunderstorms.  Everything is just as it is.

Zen Master Dogen once wrote about an eternal mirror of the Buddhas that had “no blurs or flaws within or without.”  Dogen went on to say, “The mirror is unclouded inside and out; this neither describes an inside that depends on an outside, nor an outside blurred by an inside.  There being no face or back, two individuals are able to see the same. Everything that appears around us is one, and is the same inside and out.  It is not ourself, nor other than self, but is naturally one and the same.  Our self is the same as other than self; other than self is the same as our self.  Such is the meeting of two human beings.”  This is our Buddhist practice.

What does it mean to be socially and politically involved if one doesn’t have a side?  Politics demands to know “which side are you on?”  The Abrahamic religions believe in dichotomies: good against evil, God against Satan.  Our Western culture reflects this everywhere.  We find ourselves in the midst of multiple wars both here and abroad, whether the war against terrorism, or the culture wars between fundamentalists and secularists, conservatives and progressives.

And yet, the universe does not have sides.  Buddhists do not see the world as a conflict of absolutes.  We see that everyone has his or her own limited interests, points of view, and desires and that these clash with each other. We see history as great waves of historical forces crashing into each other and creating cataclysms that resolve over time in the same way that air currents crash into each other and create weather.  The universe does not favor the east wind or the west wind.  The universe does not favor calm weather or hurricanes.  At the highest level of understanding everything just happens and just is.

Our Buddhist practice is one of cultivating compassion and wisdom and alleviating suffering wherever we encounter it.   This leads us to make certain choices in the way we vote, donate money, and communicate within the political community.  Is it possible to support a course of action without demonizing, demeaning, or ridiculing those who support another course?  Is it possible to view those who disagree with us with respect, caring, and loving-kindness?  Is it possible to do this even when we think someone’s views reflect their greed, hatred, or delusion?  This is Buddhist practice.

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