Being without hindrances is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] the mind is free of doubt.
煩悩の障りが無いことは法明門である。  それは心に疑惑が無いからである。


The word for hindrances here is bonno 煩悩, the same bonno as in the bodhisattva vows, although there it’s frequently translated as delusion: bonno mujin seigan dan or delusions are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.  Bonno are things like worldly cares, sensual desire, passions, unfortunate longings, suffering and pain.  Delusion is not a simple thing!  One word is really not enough to convey all complexity of bonno—and now we can see why they’re inexhaustible.

The first kanji of bonno (煩) is troubles, worries, vexations, concerns, afflictions or annoyances.  It has a connotation of being noisy, fussy and distracting, something clamoring for our attention.  The second (悩) gives the feeling of seduction or enchantment, something we yearn for or long for.  These are the sufferings born from our desires.  We want things even when we know they won’t help when they’re distracting us from what we really need to do or from more wholesome things.  They’re like potato chips—they seem desirable and we eat them, but they don’t really provide much nourishment, and the salt makes us thirsty.  A short time later we’re hungry again, maybe for real food this time, but potato chips are easy and taste good and satisfy our body’s desire for fat and salt.

Bonno has a feeling of temptation.   We suffer because we’re tempted by our attachments.  Even when we know we’re going to suffer because of them, somehow we can’t resist.  Whenever I overindulge in internet shopping, I have trouble paying my bills . . . but I just can’t resist that new jacket or book or video game.  Maybe this time it won’t really be a problem somehow!  This is one kind of delusion; it comes from compulsions and habituated thinking.  We do the same things over and over and somehow don’t accept the result.

Another Japanese word related to delusion is mayoi 迷い.  In Buddhism it means maya, the illusion of thinking that duality is the real nature of things.  As an everyday Japanese word it has the sense of being lost.  We hesitate and we are bewildered because we’ve lost our way, literally losing touch with reality.  When we’re deluded we believe in things that contradict ultimate reality.  We do it because of ignorance, the same root as ignore.  This delusion that comes from ignorance is the second kind of bonno.

One hundred and eight is an important number in our tradition.  It shows up here as the 108 gates of dharma illumination, and there are also said to be 108 bonno to overcome to reach Nirvana.  Temples and shrines often have 108 steps up to them, which might be two stairways of 54 steps or  three stairways of 36 steps.  In Japan at the New Year, temple bell rings 108 times to ward off delusion and protect practitioners.  

Shiku hakku 四苦八苦 is an expression meaning to be in dire distress, or to have difficulty; it represents the sufferings of life.  It has the same sound as 4, 9, 8, 9,  shi ku ha ku.  If you add up 4 times 9 and 8 times 9 it turns out to equal 108.  Shi ku ha ku (as 108 gates or bells) helps you get rid of shikuhakku (as the sufferings of life).  The physical act of ringing a bell 108 times or walking up 108 steps is a kind of body practice to symbolically eliminate each bonno.

In any event, the Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy from which our Soto school descends says that there are four fundamental bonno from which all the other ones spring:

• gachi 我癡:  ignorance of the reality of egolessness and impermanence
• gaken: 我見 clinging to established views of the things around us; it can be translated “selfish mind”; literally “looking at myself”
• gaman: 我慢 arrogance, putting ourselves ahead of others
• ga-ai: 我愛 self-attachment  literally self love

Ignorance, egocentric view, arrogance and self-attachment are the basic bonno.  The 我 at the beginning of each of these means I or me.  They’re all centered on I: my attachment to certain things, my point of view, my concept of myself, my need to be better than others.

In the gate statement, bonno is part of a larger phrase: bonno no sawari 煩悩の障り.  Sawari is impediment, obstacle or hindrance, and the complete phrase means the hindrance of seductive delusion.  Buddha said that a hindrance is something that overwhelms our awareness and weakens our discernment.  He said having hindrances is like having a river where the water gets diverted through various little channels until it loses momentum and the current stops flowing.  It’s like these hindrances sap our energy or our attention until we just can’t go forward anymore.  If on the other hand we dam up all those little channels of hindrance, the river keeps flowing strongly and we can stay focused and stay on the path.  We don’t fall prey to the seductive distractions of our delusions.  Interestingly, one of the hindrances the Buddha talks about is uncertainty or doubt, to which we’ll return shortly.

The next part of the gate statement is nai koto 無いこと, a thing that does not exist or does not arise.  The bodhisattva vows say delusions are inexhaustable—we never run out of delusions.  We keep working on their non-arising, and they still keep showing up.  We don’t have to count up to 108 to know there are a lot.

Dogen wrote a poem that gives an illustration about how hindrances or sawari get in the way:
People in this world are like an elephant going out the window. 
Only its tail remains without being pulled through. 
[Such a tiny thing becomes] the obstacle [to renouncing the mundane world].  ("Obstacle" here is sawari.)

Dogen’s point is that there were many people in his time who left home to become Buddhist monks, but many of them still had some attachment to fame and profit.  The seduction of this kind of delusion was still pretty strong, and thus they were unable to free themselves from samsara.

Okumura Roshi says about this poem:
When we compete with other people and want to consider we are better than others, or we want other people to consider us as superior practitioners to them, or if we study Buddhist teachings to show others that we have better knowledge, our motivation is not genuine bodhi-mind. We are moved by our ego-centered desire to be winners in the competition. This is the way we ourselves create samsara within our own Buddhist practice. That is the tiny tail of the elephant that binds us to samsara. 

Even within our practice, seductive delusion is there!

The rest of the gate statement is about shin ni giwaku 心に疑惑:  doubt, mistrust, or misgivings of the heart-mind.  The feeling of giwaku is confusion and bewilderment.  It’s not just being suspicious of something, but being perplexed and unable to make up one’s mind about the right choice.  We have misgivings because we’re confused, not because we see our options clearly and don’t have confidence in this one or that one.

Buddha said there were eight objects of doubt:

• doubt in regard to the three treasures: Buddha, dharma and sangha
• the (threefold) training of wisdom, ethics and concentration or prajna, sila and samadi; this is another way to say the eightfold path
• the past, the future, both past and future
• and the whole notion of dependent origination, that everything arises from causes and conditions

The overall feeling of this gate is that we’re usually being led astray by the seductive nature of our delusions.  Walking around in this fog of unclarity that makes it hard for us to find our way, but when we can see the true nature of reality clearly and the fog lifts, then the hindrances to our expression of our Buddha nature don’t arise and we don’t have any doubt about practice, teachings and whether to walk this path.

The Samannaphala Sutra says: 
A man traveling through a desert, aware that travelers may be plundered or killed by robbers, will, at the mere sound of a twig or a bird, become anxious and fearful, thinking: “The robbers have come!” He will go a few steps, and then out of fear, he will stop, and continue in such a manner all the way; or he may even turn back. Stopping more frequently than walking, only with toil and difficulty will he reach a place of safety, or he may not even reach it.

It is similar with one in whom doubt has arisen in regard to one of the eight objects of doubt.  Doubting whether the Master is an Enlightened One or not, he cannot accept it in confidence, as a matter of trust. Unable to do so, he does not attain to the paths and fruits of sanctity. Thus, as the traveler in the desert is uncertain whether robbers are there or not, he produces in his mind, again and again, a state of wavering and vacillation, a lack of decision, a state of anxiety; and thus he creates in himself an obstacle for reaching the safe ground of sanctity. In that way, skeptical doubt is like traveling in a desert.

That reminds me of the part of the Heart Sutra that says: 
With nothing to attain, a bodhisattva relies on prajna paramita and the mind is without hindrance.  Without hindrance, there is no fear.  Far beyond all inverted views, one realizes nirvana.

By the way, the Japanese word that’s translated here as “hindrance” is not sawari but a different word: samatageru 妨げる.  This one means to obstruct, block or prevent.  Interestingly, this same kanji is used in words related to electrical insulators—something that prevents electricity flowing between two connectors.  It’s a helpful picture: our hindrances keep our Buddha nature insulated by covering it up.  We have a harder time making contact with it when it’s buried in delusion.

Finally, the gate statement says that without hindrances the mind is free from doubt.  Doubt is itself one of the hindrances and Buddha said some of the same things about it that he said about ill-will.  When we dwell on feelings of doubt, not only do we strengthen the doubt we have, we set the conditions for new doubts to arise.  Hanging out with people who are noble friends, or good role models for us, helps dispel doubt.  Suitable conversation, or paying attention to Right Speech, is also important.  Those three antidotes are the same as for ill-will.

Buddha teaches about two other ways to work with doubt also.  First is dharma study, getting to know the scriptures, asking questions about what you don’t understand, and becoming familiar with the teachings.  Second is following the precepts, whatever form that takes in your life.  If you’ve formally received lay precepts or you’re part of the ordained sangha, you carry out those vows.  If you’ve not done something formal, at least be familiar with the precepts and make an effort to live in a wholesome way.  With these two kinds of effort we can develop some firm conviction about the Three Treasures.  That leads us to take refuge because we know we can rely on the three treasures as a complete expression of the buddha-dharma.  We even include a reference to being without hindrance in the refuge chant we do as part of the ryaku fusatu ceremony every month:

I take refuge in Sangha, together with all beings
Bringing harmony to everyone, free from hindrance.

To take refuge in something, you really need to believe in it.  We need to believe in immersing body and mind deeply in the way and awakening true mind.  We need to believe in entering the merciful ocean of Buddha’s way, and we need to believe in bringing harmony to everyone, free from hindrance.  We need to really know that these are wholesome, real things that reflect our true nature.

Buddha said that when we have hindrances like ill-will and doubt, we can’t be clear about what’s good for ourselves and what’s good for others and what’s good for both.  We’re going to do what we shouldn’t do and not do what we should do, and on that basis we perpetuate suffering and get a bad reputation.  He said that giving up hindrances is not only the basis of wisdom but the manifestation of wisdom.  When we do, the mind becomes flexible and steady and we’re better able to concentrate on practice.

You’d think that the outstanding teachers in our dharma family would never have been bothered by doubt or seduced away from practice by delusion, but at least two of them were, and they’ve shared that experience so we can learn from it.  First is Dogen, who’s Great Doubt led him to some of the insights and teachings that define the Soto school today.  His teachers were telling him that everyone has buddha nature, and his question was: then why do we have to practice?  Nonetheless, he kept at it, visited various teachers and ultimately came to an answer that resolved his doubt.  He realized that we don’t practice in order to get something like Buddha nature or awakening, but that practice and our moment-by-moment lives are manifestations of the true self that we already are.

The other teacher with doubts was Uchiyama Roshi.  He wrote about how he and others who were practicing with Sawaki Roshi had serious doubts about this just-sitting as opposed to working with koans or trying to get satori:  
Kodo Sawaki had a special appeal as a human being as well as having a distinctive character as a true zen monk. . . . Those who heard his zen dis­course for the first time were immediately drawn to him as iron is drawn to a magnet. So despite roshi’s declara­tion that the practice of zazen will come to nothing (his way of expressing the character of zazen for which there is “no gain and no satori”), many of his audience would conclude that in the course of practicing zazen they would surely attain something. That’s why so many became his students.

Those lay practitioners, who come to sesshins from their homes to join us in zazen may not have thought as deeply about shikantaza as those who shaved their heads and were ordained by roshi, devoting their lives to zazen. They may not reach a point as many of the monks did where they have doubts about shikantaza. no matter how much these monks practice zazen it doesn’t completely satisfy their hunger. it’s as if they never feel completely full no matter how much they eat. For them not feeling sufficiently satisfied now means they haven’t had their fill of the thing called satori.

Young people, in particular, who have thrown themselves into a religious practice will wonder whether it is meaningful spending their early lives practicing a zazen in which nothing stays with them. Once they start feeling this way, they begin to feel that the seniors who have practiced for many years are all deluded beings once their exterior coat has been peeled off. So, they presume, they had better attain satori. For this reason many leave roshi’s community. I too was riddled with doubts. however, I stayed with roshi for twenty-five years until his death, serving as his attendant and continuing my zazen practice. So i understand how people feel when they have doubts about this practice.  On the other hand, I also understand the meaning of shikantaza as expressed by Zen master Dogen and by Sawaki roshi.

He goes on to say that when we try to read Dogen Zenji’s writings or even Sawaki Roshi’s teachings, we don’t understand what they’re saying and we doubt the practice.  Like the Buddha, he encourages us to do some dharma study so that we can see that these writings are simply talking about our everyday moment-to-moment experience.  They sound mysterious and exotic to us, particularly Dogen’s writings, but we’ve probably all had the experience of hearing Okumura Roshi or another teacher do some exegesis on something Dogen wrote and suddenly it all makes sense.

All our teachers are saying: stick with it.  Watch out for the seductive delusions that lead us astray.  Pay attention to hindrances like doubt when they arise, and don’t feed them.  Do shikantaza, let go of thoughts and cultivate some insight.  When we do, we can develop confidence that our practice is meaningful and worthwhile.

The non-arising of ill-will is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we protect ourselves and protect others.
不生惡心是法明門、自護護他故。

When we considered the gates related to each of the four brahma viharas, or divine abodes--benevolence, compassion, joy and abandonment—we saw that cultivating these qualities is said to help us overcome ill will.  Maybe you've also encountered the five hindrances that are known to be obstacles to tranquility of mind—sensory desire, sloth and torpor, restlessness, doubt and ill will.  That last one refers to all kinds of thoughts related to wanting to reject: feelings of hostility, resentment, hatred and bitterness.  

Early teachings say that ill will arises when we encounter an object of aversion, and that when we pay undue attention to our aversion we both nourish existing ill will and create the causes and conditions for additional ill will arising.  Paying attention to loving kindness does the opposite: it keeps ill will from arising and diminishes the impact of ill will that already exists.

Let’s start with this object of aversion that gives rise to our feelings of ill will.  Hostility, hatred, resentment and  bitterness arise when we feel threatened in some way.  Somehow, the small self isn’t going to get what it wants, and on that basis it’s afraid of annihilation, this despite the self being a temporary collection of five skandhas.  We dwell on the things about this object of aversion that we find unpleasant until we get caught up in ill will and look for ways to remove this thing from our experience.

Thus ill-will is about aversion, running away from stuff we don’t want and creating rejection and separation.  Craving is the opposite, but it provides the same energy and we’re always chasing or running away from something.  However, there’s some subtlety here.  My understanding is that in the Sanskrit, ill will or byapada is not interchangeable with anger or hatred.  It’s the intention to do harm, a malevolent intention.  There’s connotation of movement, rather than just feeling or thought.  Even so, there are those who say that ill will is the same as anger or aversion or other things.  We don’t need to decide that here, but let’s just not lose sight of the aspect of ill will that’s about actively wishing harm to others.  

We investigate what’s happening for us in the moment by moving our attention away from the object of aversion toward the ill will itself.  When Buddha taught about the hindrances of which ill will is one, he said we have to know when it’s present and when it’s not.  We have to know how it arises and how it’s dissolved.  We also have to know how to keep it from arising in the first place.  In addition, we can ask: What is our ill will covering?  Frustrated desire, fear, insecurity, some other discomfort?

Ill will is the ninth on Buddha’s list of ten unwholesome actions.  These are things done with body, speech and mind, and they’re related to the three poisonous minds of greed, anger and ignorance.  Anger or hatred is said to give rise to ill will.  When we engage in ill will or any of the ten unwholesome actions, we create suffering for ourselves and for others.  Avoiding these actions is the path that leads to the cessation of suffering for ourselves and protects others.

Psychologists say there are various reasons that ill will can arise.  We’re envious of what someone else has and we think it’s unfair that we don’t have it.  We’ve convinced ourselves someone else is inferior in some way, and either we need to feel that we have power over others, or we’re worried that we have the same inferior characteristics so we want to distance ourselves to show we’re not the same.  Maybe we’ve been injured or humiliated by someone else, or maybe we’ve just learned this ill will from our parents or community or other social groups.

All of this is based on feeling powerless.  The five skandhas are clinging to the five skandas as tightly as possible, even though the self is impermanent and even though the self is not separate from anything, let alone from the object of our aversion.  Ill will towards others fuels separation and ill will from them can help to fuel isolation.  A like-minded group can be bound togther by aversion; it’s how members connect with each other.  Ill will provides energy and makes life interesting and not flat.  There’s a lot of energy in ill will, and once we get caught up in it it’s hard to find our way out.

The Pali Canon says, If there is a pot of water heated on the fire, the water seething and boiling, a man with a normal faculty of sight, looking into it, could not properly recognize and see the image of his own face. In the same way, when one’s mind is possessed by ill-will, overpowered by ill-will, one cannot properly see the escape from the ill-will which has arisen; then one does not properly understand and see one’s own welfare, nor that of another, nor that of both; and also texts memorized a long time ago do not come into one’s mind, not to speak of those not memorized.

If we’re caught up in ill will, that’s all we can see.

There’s a famous section of the Dhammapada, one of the earliest teachings, that says, He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me: for those who harbor such thoughts ill will never ceases.  He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me: for those who do not harbor such thoughts ill will ceases.  In this world hatred is never appeased by ill will;  ill will is always appeased by love.  This is an ancient law.

We turn ill will and resentment around by cultivating loving-kindness.  That sounds nice, but what does that mean?

The Dalai Lama says we need "internal disarmament" in order to bring about genuine peace.  Internal disarmament is letting go of things like ill will in ourselves before we can work for peace with others.  If we don’t first deal with our own ill will, we might draw from it the energy needed to make external change, but we’ll simply replace one flawed system with another.  We might get angry about systemic injustice and out of that might come some useful change, but then our ill will persists, and when we’re the ones in charge, we can start abusing our own power.  We project that ill will onto whoever opposes us, and then our other hindrances kick in.  I think my intentions are good.  I think I understand the real reality we’re facing better than others.  Therefore, I need to be in charge and run things myself so that they run properly, and I never stop to take care of ill will and anger I’m still carrying.

Non-arising of ill will doesn’t mean we ignore our difficult feelings or repress them somehow.  It means we have to transform how we see whatever it is that’s giving rise to these feelings.  We have to see all beings as those for whom we cannot harbor ill will.

In that earlier essay on benevolence I mentioned that it’s difficult to have ill will for dogs or infants or beings who may be vulnerable.  Can we have that same approach to all the beings we encounter?  Okumura Roshi has written:  Of course it is usually very difficult or seemingly impossible for us to do so. In fact, if we can love someone, that person is not our enemy; people become our enemies because we cannot love them. So each of us must transform our consciousness and go beyond discriminations between friends and enemies.

The gate statement says that we are to protect ourselves and others.  It’s more difficult to have ill will for someone you’re trying to protect.  There has to be some little spark of compassion.  We can ask: is there some good quality in the object of our aversion?  That tiny spark is the place where we can begin to cultivate some loving kindness.  Is there some common ground, something we share?  Maybe it’s simply that we both care strongly about the topic at hand?  Or simply that we’re both human beings who suffer?  Is there something we can do to encourage this little spark to grow in the other person?  Can we encourage positive behavior?  What can we offer?

Approaching someone with an open hand that’s offering something rather than with a closed fist is a first step.  Maybe it’s only for ourselves.  We don’t know what causes and conditions have led to someone’s words or actions.  While we’re not being asked to condone toxic behavior or ignore injury, we are being asked to give up clinging to hatred and the desire for revenge.  It’s not so much that we can change the people around us and make them stop being objects of our aversion; people suffer from some pretty deeply entrenched delusion, and they don’t necessarily want to change.  The point is that by meeting ill will with loving kindness, we take care of ourselves as well as others.  We foster our own calmness and peace, and by extension that protects others in addition to reducing our own suffering with feelings of agitation and unhappiness.

We can notice what’s happening and how we feed our ill will.  When those feelings start to arise, we can notice them in body and mind before we get hijacked.  We can stop replaying scenes and fantasies in our minds about the injuries that have been done to us and how we’re going to get even.  Being stuck in that loop is a hindrance to taking useful action.  We have to let go even if we didn’t get our revenge and even if circumstances didn’t change, and then we can decide to do something else even though ill will feels good.  Righteous indignation feels strong and powerful.  I know I’m right and someone else is clearly inferior!

Dogen says in the Shobogenzo Zuimonki: Even when you are clearly right and others are mistaken, it is harmful to argue and defeat them.  On the other hand, if you admit fault when you are right, you are a coward.  It is best to step back, neither trying to correct others not conceding to mistaken views.  If you don’t react competitively and you let go of the conflict, others will also let go of it without harboring ill-will.  Above all, this is something you should keep in mind.

We can choose not to accept the gift of ill will and to leave it alone.  In other words, we can choose not to argue unless we have to.  That’s how we protect ourselves and others.

Those early Buddhist teachings go on to say that our own ill will doesn’t really help us achieve anything.  It doesn’t have any effect on the object of our aversion because our feelings are our own creation.  Likewise, someone else’s ill will for you doesn’t diminish your own virtues and good qualities because those feelings are that person’s own creation.  Ill will is no real help to anyone and it takes a lot of energy and attention that you’d really rather be putting toward other things.

Nonetheless, ill will and its resulting actions by one person or organization can lead to ill will and unskillful action by another.  This is why the gate statement says that nonarising of ill will is the way we protect ourselves and others.  If we don’t take on someone else’s ill will toward us and we don’t engage with it, it’s said to be like an unaccepted gift.  If we don’t accept this “gift”, then that ill will has nowhere to go and nothing to engage with.

Hojo-san has several times told the story of Bodhisattva Never Disparaging:
In the Lotus Sutra there is a chapter called “Bodhisattva Never-Disparaging.”  This chapter is the story about a bodhisattva who made prostrations to everyone he met saying, “I will never disparage you because in the future you will attain Buddhahood.”  Other monks and lay people were arguing about Buddhist teachings, each trying to prove their own understanding was best.  But the bodhisattva Never-Disparaging did not study systems of doctrine or meditation; he just walked the streets and made prostrations to whomever he met, saying he would never disparage them because they would someday become Buddhas. But those arguing did not like this bodhisattva because he would not choose sides in arguments; he said he respected everyone involved in any argument since all were bodhisattvas. From the perspective of the people arguing and fighting, a person who respected all points of view in their conflicts could not be a friend. Sometimes people even beat or threw stones at Bodhisattva Never-Disparaging, but as long as he lived he did not stop his practice of honoring everyone he met.

Here’s example of someone who didn’t take up the gift of ill will.  He approached everyone with open hands.

Early teachings give two other ways to work with ill will.  One is noble friendship and the other is suitable conversation.  These are both about putting ourselves into wholesome surroundings that let us take care of ourselves and others, and about developing healthy habits and letting go of unhealthy ones.

Noble friends are people you hang out with who are good examples or models for you.  They have experience with living a wholesome life.  These could be sangha friends and practitioners, but they could really be anybody in your life who has wisdom and compassion.  Spending time in the company of people who don’t harbor ill will helps us not to feed that habituated thinking in ourselves.

As for suitable conversation, one of the ways ill will takes hold is when we forget about right speech and start griping and complaining with others.  Everyone’s views start to reinforce each other and we fan the flames of our ill will.  We really want to be validated in what we think, and if what we think is that this or that person or organization deserves contempt, then we want to know that others agree.  That’s powerful stuff, both because we want to fit in and because we can pick up all kinds of stuff we can use to shore up our ideas about I’m right and they’re wrong and I’m going to get my own back.

We tend not to immerse ourselves in material that challenges what we believe.  We’d rather pay attention to material that reinforces our views and makes us right and comfortable.  That’s one of the reasons that practice is both valuable and difficult.  We’re frequently asked to put aside our habituated thinking and see what’s really true, and not just because the teacher or the sangha says so; we have to do own practice.

Causes and conditions are huge and outside our ability to completely know, so it’s good to maintain some perpsective.  We have to be careful about attributing bad intentions to others.  Someone did something and I feel injured, but was that injury really directed at me personally?  Was there really a malevolent intention or do I just need someone to blame?  Is the threat or injury to me really as big and long-term as I think it is right now?

Of course, one important aspect of being bodhisattvas is accepting that there is suffering in our lives.  We’re all going to be injured and wounded in some way.  We’ll never have peace if we think that happiness and a normal life is a life without suffering.  We need to put that expectation aside, because reality doesn’t work that way and we’re just setting ourselves up.  We have to give up clinging to our ideas about how things “should” be.  I shouldn’t have any less than those around me.  She shouldn’t have been rewarded for poor performance.  We shouldn’t have to put up with people who aren’t like us.

It’s important not to deal with your ill will by having ill will for yourself, feeling bad about your feelings.  As the Dhammapada said, hatred doesn’t get dealt with by applying more hatred.  Just like other feelings and situations, ill will is impermanent.  It arises and passes, so we can watch it and identify it but we don’t need to identify with it.  Ill will is not the sum total of who we are, even though when it’s happening it’s all we can see.

We don’t need to have guilt about our feelings.  They’re part of the human condition.  We do need to have the courage to look them in the eye and see what’s really going on.  Then we get to consider what will help that ill will dissolve.

Inhibition of self-conceit is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] wisdom is fulfilled.
我慢を治めることは法明門である。

We’ve talked frequently here about the relationship between individual self and universal self.  This isn’t the first time we’ve encountered a gate that seems to be about managing our arrogance and pride.  However, “inhibition of self-conceit” seems like an unusual phrase.  Two important feelings come out from the kanji; one is patience and tolerance, and the other is governing or managing.  In other words, this gate is less about having a high opinion of ourselves and more about having self-control, self-discipline, or self-restraint—we might say personal maturity.

“Wisdom is fulfilled” also seems like an unusual phrase.  This wisdom is prajna, and there’s a feeling of satisfaction or sufficiency.  “Fulfilling” in this case is to realize or make real.  We might say “wisdom is fulfilled” is to completely manifest prajna without any gaps.

Now this gate makes a bit more sense.  If we exercise some self-control, we completely manifest the prajna that’s already here.  We get out of the way.  

That doesn’t mean we suppress the small self, or make it less real or less important than the larger self.  Both are equally real and equally important.  Uchiyama Roshi says that desires and cravings are a manifestation of the life force, so we don’t need to hate them or get rid of them.  We just need to not be caught up in them.

It seems important not to stumble over the English words.  For one thing, if these is no self, then how can there be self-conceit or self-control?  Then what about words like like “inhibit” and “control?”  The root of “inhibit” is to hold something.  Control is about restricting activity.  There’s a feeling of rigidity, or blocking something by force.  However. practice isn’t about forcing anything.  Self-control isn’t about forcing ourselves to be inauthentic or act in an unnatural way.  Instead, we let go of being pulled around by the three poisons, and then we manifest prajna.

In particular, self-control is about not being at the mercy of our emotions and desires and being able to manage how we express them in our behavior, especially in difficult situations.  Not being at the mercy of our delusion is the same as prajna, seeing clearly the nature of self and the nature of reality.  When we see clearly, we don’t go to pieces when strong emotions or cravings come up.  We can keep our patience and equanimity and still recognize what’s arising for us.

Sawaki Roshi said, “Illusion means being unstable.  Illusion means being controlled by the situation.”  When we don’t really know what’s going on, we really feel the need to try to control things.  That’s when we have angry outbursts, say unkind things or take some desperate unskillful action.  In trying to control the situation, we lose control of ourselves and become unstable.

When we see clearly, we’re able to let go of some of that fear of the unknown.  When we let go of our illusions, we’re no longer at the mercy of the situation.  We remember that everything is impermanent, and that the universe doesn’t do things just because they're what we want, so we can manage our expectations.  The self doesn’t really need all the defending that we’re inclined to do.  Ironically, we could say that self-control comes from the small self not needing to be in control, at least when it comes to satisfying all of our cravings and aversions.

It isn’t that the emotions and desires don’t arise—they do, because we’re human.  This gate isn’t saying we should ignore or suppress those emotions and desires, because that’s not healthy.  It’s encouraging us to consider how we express those emotions and desires, what we do with them in the outside world.  Are our cravings and aversions leading us into unskillful behavior?  That could be everything from addictive behaviors, eating disorders or impulsivity to simply getting annoyed with a friend.

Usually we think about self-control as our rational functions prevailing over our feelings and emotions, the rational self keeping the unruly passions under control.  Current thinking in brain science says that that can’t actually work, because they don’t operate separately.  Rational functions are heavily influenced by feelings.  

When I worked for the government, I used to make this point with people I was coaching as they prepared to make presentations.  These presenters needed to get something approved, or at least gain acceptance for an idea or an approach, but government data can be dry and dull, and they make for a boring presentation.  I used to suggest presenters tell stories about humans affected by this information, because decisionmakers weren’t actually making decisions based on impersonal data, but on how they felt about them.  If you’re talking about affordable housing, tell about moving-in day for the single mother with four kids who finally has a safe place to live.  I had to give these presenters permission to include feelings and values in the presentations, and acknowledge the entirely of the audience’s experience and the human condition, because somehow in the government you’re not supposed to recognize that people have and use emotions.  It wasn’t that those feelings and values weren’t there in the audience members—they just weren’t being acknowledged.  

The data are connected to our values, and that’s how we make decisions about our behavior.  Frequently, there are two values in conflict, and that’s where we suffer related to self-control.  On the one hand, we know that lovely big bar of chocolate is going to taste good, and we’re hardwired as mammals to want sugar and fat.  On the other hand, we also want to be healthy and fit and live a long, full life, or have certain kinds of attractive bodies.  If we make the healthy choice, it’s because the desire for health is focusing our reasoning on the wellness consequences of the chocolate binge, not because reason alone made us take the skillful action.  In this moment, one value system came out stronger than the other.

In a previous gate essay, I mentioned that taking an unskillful action once makes it easier to take the same action again (provided you were successful in getting whatever you wanted).  If two sets of values are clashing and one wins out, our habit is to not repeat that argument.  Well, last time it was good (or at least OK) to take this action, so probably it’s good or OK to do it again this time.  This is habituated thinking.

Interestingly, what’s hardwired into us as humans for prehistoric survival is sometimes at odds with modern values, as we saw with the chocolate example.  I see a direct link here to Uchiyama Roshi’s conundrum about peace and progress.  Again, his big question was about how we maintain some contentment and peace of mind while still engaging in the development and progress that we need in the modern world.  Humans, like other animals, have always been engaged in competition for territory, food, mates and other things.  Today, people are also competing for fame, profit and self-image, yet they also want to be happy, contented and comfortable.  These two value systems can be in conflict.  One kind of self-control can be to put off taking time off at home and resting in order to work hard for a promotion.  Another can be to let go of the need for fame and gain in order to live simply and peacefully.  Neither of those things is bad; both could be skillful action, and both could be examples of self-control.  How can we find a balance?

Self-control or self-discipline can be related to habituated thinking, and if so then we can begin to see how to practice with it.  Our habituated thinking says that there is a fixed and permanent self that needs things or needs to avoid things.  It says that I’m separate from others and from the universe, and I’m not responsible for the effect my actions have in the world.  Out of these delusions, we’ve developed some habits of body, speech and mind.  Breaking any habit is a matter of paying attention.  Here’s that craving, aversion, impulse or thought again.  What’s really going on here?  Recognize what’s happening, don’t look away, and accept that this habit or feeling is there.  Why does this seem important?  What values are arguing with each other here?  What’s going on in the body?  Investigate this thought or feeling.

Looking carefully and seeing clearly allows some space for our natural prajna.  We can stop identifying with the feeling and have some nonattachment.  Nonattachment is not separation; we can completely enter into what’s happening for us while not being attached to what’s happening.  This is the realm of governing or managing ourselves with patience and tolerance. 

We need to briefly consider here the relationship between zazen and self-control, and it takes us right back to “zazen is good for nothing,” Okumura Roshi’s famous translation of a Kodo Sawaki phrase.  Actually, this teaching shows up much earlier in Dogen’s Fukanzazengi as “Zazen is not shuzen (習禪)” or “Zazen is not meditation practice.”  Shuzen literally means “learning Zen,” which is to try to control the body and mind with your intellect.  It also means you’re sitting zazen with the objective of seeking some spiritual peace and tranquility.  “Learning Zen” or shuzen is when zazen is used as a means to get something. 

However, the next line in the Fukanzazengi says, “It is simply the dharma gate of joyful ease.”  When we just sit and open the hand of thought, then the mind settles down and we find ourselves right in the midst of the dharma.  Zazen is not a practice of self-power or self-control.  It’s not about forcing ourselves to sit still in a certain way when we’d rather get up and do something else, and not a matter of trying to put things in order with our own energy or intellect.  When we let go of the self, we’re already in order.

If zazen is not a technique for cultivating self-control, what can we actively do to begin noticing when we’re falling down and try to work on it?  One thing is to pay attention to our temptations and distractions.  Once we’re aware of what triggers our impulsive behavior, we can minimize those distractions.  Something is winning out over our good intentions—it’s a clash of values.  What are we running away from by giving in to our cravings and aversions and losing our self-control?  What’s our motivation for managing ourselves well, and what’s our motivation for giving in to unskillful impulse?  Do we need to avoid the potato chip aisle or the beer and wine section of the grocery store?  There’s a reason we don’t bring our tablets and phones into the zendo, why the things in that room are simple, and why we do sesshin without toys.

Another thing we can do is to consider the role of faith in our practice.  We’re willing to delay gratification, if you will, when we believe in what we’re doing.  Because zazen is good for nothing, it’s not about thinking that there’s a bigger reward coming for sticking it out and finishing the period than for getting up and getting a snack.  If we believe that our being bodhisattvas is wholesome and necessary in the world, that value can win out over the cookies.  Our forms and precepts are also helpful in reminding us about our vows and the teachings, and helping us manage ourselves compassionately.  Having some structure can help us work with our impulses and remind us about the interdependence between self and others, and between the individual and universal selves.  Forms and structures are handrails we can hold onto until we can manage ourselves in the way we want to on our own.

Speaking of compassion and tolerance for ourselves, we need to make sure we rest.  When we’re under stress and under siege, we’re much more likely to lose our self-control and act out in unskillful ways.  After sesshin at Sanshin, we take the next morning off from the usual two or three hours of practice that start before dawn.  Being committed to the dharma center is good, but burnout is not.  Going straight from one task to another to another is a recipe for fatigue and instability.  Everyone needs balance, a life outside of the dharma center and activities that are not directly related to zazen, work and study.

Exercising self-control doesn’t mean we don’t take care of ourselves or that we become cogs in the practice machine.  There’s no question that our practice asks us to consider self-control.  It’s important to know that what we do affects others as well as ourselves.  When we lose control and do stuff we regret later, we reinforce unskillful habits for ourselves and maybe we cause suffering for others.  Thus to practice with self-control so that our prajna shines through, we need to deeply understand the nature of self.  We need to see how our delusions about self cause us to put a lot of energy into gratifying cravings and aversions.  It’s not that we negate the self or become martyrs, because then that small self becomes a toddler having a tantrum.  What more common image is there of losing self control?

If we can patiently and tolerantly become familiar with our values and motivations, we can see what’s really happening when we lose our self-control.  There are some important questions we can ask ourselves about this and there’s some discernment we can do.  One of the five elements of spiritual health is clear understanding of one’s inner truths and on what these are based. (1)  If we’re encountering situations in our lives and not always making the choices we want to be making, what’s going on?  What value is struggling with what other value?  Are there things you can understand about that argument that help shift the balance of power?  Are there ways you can remind yourself of the benefits of seeing with eyes of prajna rather than with eyes of toddler?

If self-control is about being skillful in expressing our emotions and desires, then we don’t have to deny our strong feeling when they come up.  If it’s time to cry, it’s time to cry.  If it’s time to get someone’s attention with some strong words, so be it.  We can do those things fully and authentically without being destructive.  That happens because we’re not at the mercy of these strong feelings.  We can completely integrate them into our moment by moment experience and see them fully for what they are, and  maybe we’re a little less likely to be blindsided by them and knocked off our feet.  We can keep our attention where we want it, wherever that may be, without being distracted.

Trying to maintain control by willpower, or force of intellect, is only going to get us so far.  Prajna doesn’t show up until we open the hand of thought.  Being authoritarian with ourselves just creates more ideas and more thinking and more disturbance.  We’re already wise.  We don’t need to coerce ourselves into being something we’re not.  There are consequences of taking this human form, but this form is also the ground of our practice.  Befriending our impulses means we become more intimate with ourselves, and because we’re not separate from the universe we become more intimate with that too.  

Studying the self might mean taking a psychological approach, but from a practice perspective that’s not the whole story because it doesn’t necessarily take into account the universal self and the three marks of existence: impermanence, interconnection and no-self.  In order to fulfill wisdom, or completely manifest pranja without any gaps, we need to patiently steer ourselves toward our aspiration and our vows, because then self-control, self-discipline and self-restraint arise naturally.

Notes
(1) There are five generally accepted elements of spiritual health:

• a balance/integration between individual and universe or self and whole
• a feeling of hope or optimism that one is capable of getting through tough times and an understanding of where to turn for help
• an underlying sense of peace and wellbeing
• a sense of purpose in life and that life has meaning
• a clear understanding of one’s inner truths and on what these are based
• a way to work with (not necessarily to completely answer) the big questions: Who am I? What is my life about? What’s my place in the universe? How do I make decisions? What’s my relationship to other beings?

Awareness of time is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not treat spoken teaching lightly. 
知時是法明門、不輕言故.

This gate is about having a sense of urgency and not wasting time.  It’s not just a matter of applying ourselves, but applying ourselves properly.  If practice is based on ignorance, it’s a waste of time.

First let’s review the ways that Dogen looks at time, and then let’s take up this idea of wasting time in our practice and whether that’s possible.

According to Okumura Roshi, Dogen considers time in three different ways.  The first is the common way: time flows from the past through the present to the future.  The second is the time that is the absolute present.  The past has gone and doesn’t exist anymore, and the future has not yet come and doesn’t exist yet.  The only actual time is the present. There’s a famous passage in the Genjokoan in which he says:
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 at the position of ash, with its own before and after.

Although before and after exist, past and future are cut off.  At this present moment, firewood is completely dwelling in the dharma position of firewood.  In the past it was a live tree, but that time has gone.  In the future, after the firewood is burned, it will be completely gone and only ash will exist.  The ash isn’t here now.  The live tree isn’t here now.  There is only firewood now.  The past isn’t reality any more, and future isn’t reality yet.  Only this present moment is actual.   That’s what “past and future are cut off” means.

Okumura Roshi frequently explains Uchiyama Roshi’s view that the present moment has no length.  If it had any length, we could cut it in half and one part would be in the past and the other in the future.  The present is only a boundary between the not-existing past and the not-existing future.  The present is 0.  Time disappears when we look at in this way.  This is the second way of looking at time: time is the absolute present, what I often call the eternal now.

The third way of considering time is that it doesn’t flow.  In Bendowa, Dogen says:
Therefore, even if only one person sits for a short time, because this zazen is one with all existence and completely permeates all times, it performs everlasting buddha guidance within the inexhaustible dharma world in the past, present, and future.*  In our zazen, we sit at this absolute present or eternal now.  When we do that, we are one with all time and all beings; there’s no separation.  This is the time that does not flow.  There is only one moment, without any parts or segments like seconds or minutes or centuries.  Those are our ideas and ways of measuring, and we need them in order to function, but that’s just our story about the eternal now that doesn’t actually flow.

In conventional thinking about time, we can write a story about ourselves as karmically conditioned beings.  Dogen says that in zazen, the time that doesn’t flow appears because we recognize that we’re in the absolute present, and in the absolute present there’s no coming and going.  There’s only the eternity of awakening throughout all space and time, or Buddha’s eternal life.  Sawaki Roshi said, “It’s pointless for human beings merely to live a life that lasts seventy or eighty years.”  He was talking about this third way of considering time that doesn’t flow.

All three of these ways of considering time are true.  Somehow, we’re right in the middle of all of them, even though they seem to contradict each other.  Awareness of time in the conventional sense reminds us that in spite of what Sawaki Roshi said, this body has a limited lifespan.  We only get so many years in which we can practice and carry out our vows, so it’s foolish to waste time either not practicing or practicing unskillfully.

Three texts related to this gate come to mind immediately: Sandokai, Fukanzazengi and Gakudo Yojinshu.  Sandokai, or The Merging of Difference and Sameness, is a long poem by Shitou Xiqian  (J. Sekito Kisen) written in the 8th century.  The theme of the poem is that we need to see both the individual and the universal.  This is the difference and sameness.  Seeing both of these—form and emptiness, small self and universal self, individuality and universality—is seeing reality.  If we don’t see both aspects, we’re only aware of half of the story and we’re not living out our lives completely.

The end of the Sandokai says, I humbly urge you who study the mystery: don’t waste time or don’t pass your days and nights in vain.  Not wasting time in this context is not practicing with only one or the other aspect in view.  If we’re not making an effort to awaken to both form and emptiness, we’re not really practicing wholeheartedly.

In Living by Vow, Okumura Roshi says about these two lines that no matter how hard we practice, if our practice is not based on true reality we are wasting our time.  Suzuki Roshi’s advice about this line was that we shouldn’t sacrifice actual practice for idealistic practice.  If we’re practicing based on how we want things to be, or our ideas about what practice is or should be, we’re sacrificing actual practice for idealistic practice.  We’re not awake to both difference and sameness.

Next is Dogen’s Fukanzazengi, or Universal Recommendations for Zazen.  This is the first thing he wrote after coming back from China, where he practiced with his teacher Tendo Nyoji and had an experience of awakening while sitting zazen in the zendo.  He understood the importance of zazen and wanted to help others to understand by providing instructions and explanations.  Near the end of the Fukanzazengi he says:
You have gained the pivotal opportunity of human form. Do not use your time in vain. You are maintaining the essential working of the buddha way.  Who would take wasteful delight in the spark from the flintstone? Besides, form and substance are like the dew on the grass, destiny like the dart of lightning — emptied in an instant, vanished in a flash.

Human form is the only form within the six realms of samsara in which we can practice.  The other five have various impediments, so we’re frequently encouraged to be grateful that causes and conditions resulted in our being born in human form.  Fukanzazengi says it’s a pivotal opportunity and we need to not throw that opportunity away.  It goes on to say that what we’re engaged in is the essential working of the buddha way.  There’s nothing outside of that, and we don’t need to waste time looking around for things to fulfill us or make us better somehow.

Who would take wasteful delight in the spark from the flintstone?  The spark isn’t the fire—it flashes and then it’s gone.  It’s a distraction from the main thing.  To take delight in just having the spark rather than the fire is a wasted opportunity.  That’s just being pulled around by the three poisonous minds.

Earlier in the text Dogen asks why we think we need to leave our own seats and travel around through dusty foreign lands looking for awakening, peace or nirvana, and says that that’s fruitless or meaningless.  It’s just a distraction from the practice and awakening that are right in front of us, and a waste of time.  Then Dogen reminds us that forms are impermanent.  Not only are the things we’re chasing after impermanent and ultimately unsatisfying, but also this human form won’t last forever.  We have to take this opportunity to practice while we can.

Finally, we come to Dogen’s Gakudo Yojinshu, or Points to Watch in Studying the Way:  Out of fear of time slipping away too swiftly, practice the Way as if you are trying to extinguish a fire enveloping your head. Reflecting on the transiency of your bodily life, practice as diligently as the Buddha did when he raised his foot for seven days.

If your head was on fire, you would expend every effort to put it out!  This is a well-known passage, and I think it’s not a coincidence that Dogen uses a fire image.  The Lotus Sutra includes the image of the burning house, which represents samsara, where we’re in the midst of our craving, aversion and delusion.  The opposite is the peace and calm of nirvana, where we’re not pulled around by our desires and we’re not creating suffering for ourselves and others.  Our heads on fire is a powerful image of the energy that comes from our thoughts and emotions.  There’s some urgency about that picture, like we ought to pay attention to what’s happening there.

Reflecting on the transiency of your bodily life: here again we have only a limited amount of time in this human form in which to practice.  Practice as diligently as the Buddha did when he raised his foot for seven days: there’s a story that Buddha raised his foot for seven days out of admiration and respect for a buddha called Pushya.  I don’t know the circumstances of that story, but imagine effort it takes to stand on one foot for a week!  Dogen says that’s the kind of committment we need to have to practice.

All three of these texts are making the same points:
1) This human body is impermanent and it’s the ground of our practice, so we have to take advantage of that opportunty while we can.
2) Not making an effort to see both form and emptiness or both individual and universal is not practicing based on true reality, and it’s a waste of time.
3) Getting distracted by chasing after things to satisfy our cravings is wasting the limited time we have in this form to wake up.

I think it’s interesting that the gate statement makes reference to “spoken teaching.”  There’s some immediacy about spoken teaching.  Of course, the sutras are said to be transcriptions of words spoken by the Buddha; some of these are apocriphal, but when they begin “Thus have I heard,” that’s Ananda reciting what he heard the Buddha say.  Thus “spoken teaching” here could just mean all the sutras, but I’m going to read something else into it, and of course this is just my response to this gate statement.

Maybe you’re familiar with the expression ichigo ichie, literally one time, one meeting.  The idea is that this moment is unrepeatable; it will never come again.  When we encounter some teaching, we have to take advantage of that moment, or that meeting with the dharma.  If teachings are written down, maybe we can read them again later; that’s the maintaining version of the dharma treasure.  Of course, that moment of returning to a teaching is different from the moment of first encountering it.  If we hear spoken teachings, that’s a moment of encounter, whether the speaker is a dharma teacher or a sangha friend.  It might be people chanting sutras and doing liturgy, or even the sound of a creek, or wind blowing or a cat purring.  That moment won’t come again and everything is impermanent—one time, one meeting.

In that moment of encounter, we have the chance to experience the teachings (and everything else) with a fresh mind.  This is before we judge and label and decide anything.  We have the chance to absorb the spoken teaching with the body and mind before we try to study it.  

This kind of fresh encounter is the reason that Sawaki Roshi found zazen so important, not because sitting gives us the spaciousness to understand one time one meeting, but because that’s the way he first encountered zazen.  He went to Eiheiji to become a monk, but he couldn’t be ordained because he didn’t have a teacher.  Instead, he became a lay worker at Eiheiji, which gave him the opportunity to observe the practice of the monks, particularly their zazen. He saw them sitting day after day and felt something deep and sacred, but he couldn’t identify the source of that feeling.  He later said that he had encountered the real thing before studying what it was, and on that basis zazen was very special to him.

Anyway, according to this gate statement, if we really understand the nature of time, we don’t disregard any opportunity to hear and absorb spoken teachings.

The Lotus Sutra in particular encouraged people to recite it.  It says that anyone who recites the sutra or expounds the contents does it in place of Buddha, taking on the role and characteristics of Buddha or carries the Buddha on his/her/their shoulders.  Reciting or teaching the sutra is important because anyone who hears this spoken teaching is said to instantly attain awakening.  “What is the reason? When this person joyfully speaks the Dharma, those who hear it for but an instant shall directly achieve ultimate Annuttara samyak sambodhi.”

If we’re not listening when that opportunity comes along because we think we’ll have plenty more chances . . . well, maybe not!  Practitioners sometimes ask, "Does that mean we have to be hypervigilant, driving ourselves crazy trying to look for all these gates so as not to miss something?”  No—not possible, and that would be fixating on an idea about what practice and wisdom and awakening are.  We’d develop some real clinging and we might become selfish.  I need to seize the opportunity to sit that sesshin whether or not it creates problems for my family or coworkers that’s I’m away.

Instead, we let all of these teachings seep in gradually.  If we sit shikantaza and deeply experience time, for instance, in the ways that Dogen does, we understand some things about this gate statement.  We can see that in the conventional view of time, our lifetime is limited and we’re subject to illness, old age and death.  We don’t want to look back at the end of our lives and say “I wish I’d taken the time to practice more.”  Our circumstances are changing all the time, so it might not be possible to practice tomorrow or next year.  We can also see that it’s important to stay focused on our vows and not be distracted by other things that come along, and that because time is absolute, we can only act in this eternal now.  We can’t act in the future, so this is our chance to practice.

To work for the Dharma is a gate of Dharma illumination; for we act in conformity with the Dharma.
爲法是法明門、如法而行故.

Let’s start with “to work for the dharma,” and break that down.  When we hear people talking about working for the dharma, they’re usually talking about enabling practice in some way.  Does it mean having a job in a dharma center or temple?  Not necessarily, though it can.  Anybody can work for the dharma, no matter our life circumstances, as we’ll see.

The kanji that are translated here “working for the dharma” have a feeling of moving toward or carrying out a vow or aspiration for the sake of the dharma.  One way to think about “working for the dharma” is that the dharma is our boss.  To “work for” can mean I’m employed or supervised by someone or by an organization:  I work for the university or I work for the general manager at the auto repair shop.  If we work for the dharma in the sense that the dharma is our boss, what might that mean?  It means we take our direction from our practice and we make decisions based on Buddha’s teachings.  All of that comes from living by vow.  That means we’re always walking in the direction of liberating all beings from suffering—and now we’re back to the feeling of the original kanji.

We take our direction from the four bodhisattva vows, from the precepts and from the Eightfold Path.  We could say that the four vows are our job description, the precepts are the employee handbook and the Eightfold Path is our set of work assignments.  It’s reassuring to have a purpose.  One of the components of spiritual health is that one’s life has meaning, that we have a reason to get up in the morning.  Working at the direction of the dharma gives us a solid basis for decisionmaking.  We don’t have to wander around without a lifeline.  We can look to the three treasures and our practice.  

We can also take working for the dharma to mean working for the sake of the dharma.  “For the sake of” means  “for the wellbeing of.”  We’re working for the health and wellbeing of the dharma so it doesn’t die!  However, that sets up a contradiction.  On one hand, spreading the dharma to those who are looking for it and enabling practice are important.  We’re here practicing today because people have transmitted dharma and embodied teachings for 2500 years.  Traditionally, you earned considerable merit for copying sutras, feeding monks or underwriting things at your local temple, because these things helped to keep practice and teaching alive and available to people.  The Lotus Sutra, for example, actively tells the reader to propagate it.

On the other hand, working for sake of the dharma is really meaningless from the point of view of the dharma as the reality of the universe.  The dharma doesn’t need anything from us.  It was here before Buddha, and it will be here long after we’re gone.  It’s not going to die, ever!

The dharma is just doing what the dharma does.  It’s perfectly complete and fine just as it is, and there isn’t actually anything we can do for its own sake.  Sometimes we get worried about the condition of the dharma when we think that teachings are being misinterpreted or practice isn’t being done properly.  In other words, we’re concerned about the maintaining version of the dharma as one of the three treasures.

The manifesting version happened in the past and we can’t do anything about that.  As we’ve just said, the absolute version will always be fine.  The maintaining version of the dharma can certainly be misunderstood or even lost.  We have only to look at Facebook and all the greeting-card sentiments wrongly attributed to the Buddha that completely corrupt his teaching.  This is the kind of thing that Mahayana practitioners are afraid will happen during a gradual degeneration of the Buddha’s teachings in a three-phase process.   The age of the true dharma was the first 500 to 1000 years after Buddha’s death; followers were able to practice in accordance with his teachings and thereby attain awakening.  The next 1000 year period is called age of the semblance dharma.  The practice continues and things look good on the surface, but spiritual corruption has set in and true awakening doesn’t happen any more.  The final period lasts ten thousand years; that’s the age of the end of the dharma, or the age of mappo.  The teachings of Buddhism survive but actual practice of the dharma has died out and nobody is able to attain awakening. 

In Dogen’s time, everyone believed in the age of mappo, and that’s why Pure Land schools became popular.  They said that trying to attain awakening by your own efforts was impossible during the age of mappo; instead you had to rely on Amida Buddha to save you.  While Dōgen and Keizan said that traditional practice was still effective in attaining awakening, they didn’t entirely reject the idea of the age of mappo.

Thus, although the absolute dharma doesn’t need our help and there’s no way we can really work for it, there is a longstanding feeling in our tradition that teaching and practice are in some danger of being corrupted or lost.  We also have sutras asking us to propagate them and a precept about not begrudging the dharma.  Yet, we don’t have a strong evangelical streak in our tradition.  We’re not told to go out and convert everyone we can find to Buddhism and teach them all to sit.  Nonetheless, somehow people find the Buddha’s teachings and start to practice.  When we help new practitioners get a good start and we help enable the practice of our sangha, we can say that that’s working for the dharma.

Of course, Dogen had a lot to say about how we support the practice of our sangha friends.  He wrote about various things that had to be done in a temple: how to be the treasurer, how to cook the meals, how to be in charge of the zendo, how to take care of guests, etc.  All of these things are working for the dharma in that they are enabling practice within an organized sangha.  Of course, we can once again take a step back and say that the absolute sangha is the sangha of all beings, so anytime we’re moving through the world in a skillful way, we’re taking care of the sangha of all beings and working for the dharma.

We’ve seen that there are several ways we can think about this English phrase “working for the dharma”—the sense in the original is “for the sake of,” but we also considered that “for” can mean working for a boss or employer.  “For” can also point to what we get in exchange: I work for a salary or I work for my room and board.  The boss and the salary are not things that arise in the original Japanese text of this gate; English just gives us another way to look at it.

Let’s think about what working in exchange for the dharma might mean.  I don’t work for a paycheck, I work for the dharma.  In other words, when I do work anywhere in my life, I receive teachings.  That’s not so far-fetched, is it?  Even though this English phrase is not the original, this sense fits right in.  It’s a restatement of the teaching that everything we encounter is a dharma gate.  If I’m paying attention, all of my moment-to-moment activity is an opportunity to understand how universe works.  No matter what I’m doing, I have the chance to observe what’s happening in this body and mind and to let go of ideas about small self.  If I’m digging a hole in my yard or building a website, I’m receiving teachings from the universe about the nature of reality and my expectations about that reality.  For example, I live on a busy street and a lot of trash ends up in my yard.  It’s really annoying that I have to pick up after other people.  Every time I go to cut the grass, I have to clean up the yard first, and none of this is my garbage.  The reality is that unless I wall off my yard from the street, there will always be trash out there.  If I’m getting annoyed about doing the work of picking it up, it’s because I have an unrealistic expectation that somehow it’s going to stop overnight just because that’s what I want.  When I feel that frustration and contraction in my body, instead I can turn that around and call it caring for my property.  

I also have a lot of large trees that throw down big branches.  I have to pick those up too before I cut the grass.  That’s also a nuisance, but I don’t get annoyed at the trees.  They’re just doing what trees do as part of the dynamic functioning of the universe.

When I’m doing yard work, I have the opportunity to work for the dharma, to do work in exchange for receiving teachings.  Now, Dogen says that all sentient and insentient beings preach the dharma, so teachings are there whether I’m receiving them or not.  It’s not like I have to make a contract with the yard.  To work for the dharma in this sense is simply to open my eyes and pay attention.

Now we need to look at what it means to act in conformity with the dharma.  There are a lot of teachings about this, and they center on the term nyoho 如法​, which literally means in accord with the dharma.  Traditionally, nyoho is about color, material and size as they relate to food, clothing and shelter.  When we’re sewing rakusu or okesa, we pay attention to what we make them out of, what color they are and how they fit.  The material should be plain and of a broken color.  Food for meals taken with oryoki is the same.  There should be five colors, food should be nutritious and appealing but not exotic or expensive, and we should make the right amount and not waste anything.  The place in which we live should be made of appropriate materials and be the right size for what happens there.  All of these things then are made according to the dharma.  They are not distracting and we don’t form attachments.

Of course, these teachings apply to whatever we’re doing, acquiring or making.  If we are working for the dharma by enabling practice, ours or others, then the things we make and use conform to the dharma.  Also, the way we act is in accord with dharma.  Dogen famously taught that practice and awakening are not two.

We might not be concretely enabling practice for others, but we are constantly enabling our own practice.  We need to consider the ingredients we use to create that container for ourselves.  Are we building our practice out of things and activities that are in accordance with the dharma?  We can’t do this in an intellectual way, by constantly stopping to ask whether this or that is a good fit.  We’d make ourselves crazy and never get things done.  We can, little by little, put things into our lives that support our practice.  Regular zazen is the place to start; then over time we can begin to consider things like how we make our living, whether our relationships with others are what we’d like them to be, or what our buying or eating habits look like.  Gradually we can see our lives coming into conformance with the dharma, because we can see that everything is practice.

It’s not necessary to make sudden drastic changes.  We see this with newbies who come to practice and then suddenly decide they’re going to sit for three hours a day and only going to eat this or wear that or that they’re going to give away all their belongings.  Of course, this doesn’t last long.  For one thing, that’s all based on some idea about what practice is and what a practitioner is.  For another, drastic change usually isn’t sustainable.  It’s just not authentic because it doesn’t arise from understanding—it’s a performance.

When we let practice seep into us over time, we can feel our lives coming into alignment with the dharma.  Working for the dharma is conforming with the dharma.  The most basic idea of conform is to take the form of something.  We take the form of, or embody, the dharma.  Two things come up for me when I think about this.

One is that even when we don’t feel like we’re in touch with the dharma, we follow the guidelines of the teachings: following the precepts, carrying out zendo forms, trying to remember our vows.  Some days being in accord with the dharma doesn’t come from our own insight.  We can feel disconnected, troubled or confused, but fortunately, we can still rely on the teachings and practice to help us keep walking in Buddha’s way one step at a time.

The other is that when we embody the dharma, our form is seamless with the universe, without obstruction or hindrance such that everything flows and there’s no separation.  Working for the dharma means our actions are clear, direct manifestations of buddha-nature, with no muddiness caused by three poisons and no wacky bits sticking out and causing obstruction or tripping us up.

When we hear a word like conform, we might immediately think that we have to fit ourselves into a rigid mold that’s imposed on us and follow a lot of rules.  Ironically, conforming with the dharma means to be your most authentic, flexible self.  Impermanence means that there can’t be a fixed set of responses to our circumstances.  Our karmic conditions are all different, so forcing everyone into the same mold would be impossible.  If you’re dancing to music, you’re in accord with the music.  If you’re canoeing down the rapids, you’re in accord with the river.  If you’re really good at using a piece of software or a power tool, you’re in accord with that.

Nothing about practice or the dharma should be forced.  That’s not to say that sometimes practice is not difficult or uncomfortable, but the effort shouldn’t feel like we’re forcing anything.  We don’t force the body into the sitting posture, and we don’t force ourselves to stop thinking.  None of that is in accord with the dharma.  The reality is that this human form has limitations, and if we don’t recognize that, we’re caught in our delusion.

When we’re working for the dharma we’re in accord with the dharma, not just the movie of the moment that the self is showing us in our heads.

To work for living beings is a gate of Dharma illumination; for with it we do not blame others.
爲衆生是法明門、不毀呰他故.

Last week we talked about not praising oneself and said that that was one half of the seventh precept.  This week we take up the other half about not disparaging others.  Interestingly, Uchiyama Roshi made the same points as our gate statement in his last lecture at Antaiji.

You have to expect to be trampled on by difficult circumstances, maybe even for many years, but don’t lose your life force under all the pressure. Unless you have that vow, you will lose heart. Only when you live by vow does everything you meet--wherever, whenever, whatever happens--reinforce your life as buddhadharma. As long as you have that vow to live out your life wherever you are, sooner or later spring will come. And when it does, you will have the strength to grow. This is the life force. You have to thoroughly understand that this is completely different from selfish ambition.

Ultimately, development and backsliding depend only on you. It really is pointless to say that you became rotten because of your circumstances, or that your education is responsible, or that the blame belongs to somebody else. The fundamental attitude of a practitioner must be to live out one’s own whole self.

That’s a long quote, so let’s look at it more closely.

You have to expect to be trampled on by difficult circumstances, maybe even for many years . . .  He starts by saying, in essence, that life is characterized by suffering: the first of Buddha’s four noble truths.  We have to accept that we will have difficult circumstances

. . . but don’t lose your life force under all the pressure. Unless you have that vow, you will lose heart.  In the face of that suffering, we’re going to become discouraged and lose our way unless we are living by vow.  Living by vow is the opposite of living by karma.  Okumura Roshi talks about this a lot and even called one of his books Living by Vow.  Here’s how he describes the difference.  He says that part of the definition of a bodhisattva is a person living by vow rather than by karma.  Karma includes our personal habits and preferences, and also the system of values we inherit from our culture that we use to evaluate what we encounter and decide what to do.  Living on that basis is living by karma.

A bodhisattva lives by vow, pointing toward Buddha’s way.  There are several kinds of vows.  There are general vows, like the four vows we chant after the dharma talk, or the vows to follow the precepts that we take during jukai or when we become clergy.  There are also individual vows that are specific to each person about our own aspirations.  Vows are what drive our practice.  Uchiyama Roshi and the gate statement say that without the vows, we get discouraged when we meet some obstacle in our lives.  

Only when you live by vow does everything you meet—wherever, whenever, whatever happens—reinforce your life as buddhadharma.  As long as you have that vow to live out your life wherever you are, sooner or later spring will come. And when it does, you will have the strength to grow. This is the life force.  When we’re being driven by the four vows, we always know our purpose and where we’re headed.  The first vow says Beings are numberless; I vow to free them.  This is working for living beings, as it says in the gate statement.

Uchiyama Roshi says that as long as you have that vow, your whole life is the buddhadharma.  There is nothing you encounter that’s separate from you or outside the buddha way.  The vow is how we remember to take refuge in the three treasures and look to our practice for support.  It’s how we remember our place in the universe, and that we’re interconnected and being supported by all beings.  When we remember that, it helps with the discouragement.

Next, Uchiyama Roshi says an interesting thing: You have to thoroughly understand that this is completely different from selfish ambition.  Again, our aspiration is to work for living beings rather than to be dragged around by our delusions about the self.  We still make effort and we still have a direction, but that direction is not determined by the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance.  What we do is based on wisdom, compassion and generosity.  The ultimate yardstick is not necessarily our personal comfort or the fulfilling of all our cravings; our view of the world becomes much broader than ourselves.  Thus, we’re living by vow and not by karma.

Next Uchiyama Roshi says, Ultimately, development and backsliding depend only on you. It really is pointless to say that you became rotten because of your circumstances, or that your education is responsible, or that the blame belongs to somebody else. The fundamental attitude of a practitioner must be to live out one’s own whole self.

Now we’re getting to the stuff about blame.  By the way, the root of the word blame is the same as for blaspheme, so certainly something is going on here about unwholesome speech.  The point is that it’s not possible to blame others for your suffering if you’re not separate from them and you’re working on their behalf.  

If we’re living out our own whole selves, we’re living the life of the universal self.  That means we’re not focused on our small grievances.  It also means that we really understand the Right View component of the Eightfold Path.  Right View is deeply understanding the nature of suffering and how it arises.  If we really understand where our suffering comes from, we see that it doesn’t come from other people.  It comes from clinging to our own expectations and ideas about how things “should” be.  Just because I think things should be a certain way, that doesn’t mean the universe agrees!

When things don’t go my way, the easy response is to blame someone else.  Probably, I’m doing that rather than taking responsibility for my own suffering.

I want to emphasize here the difference between acceptance and approval.  We need to accept that there is suffering and how it arises.  That doesn’t mean that suffering is OK and we shouldn’t do anything about it, and it doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t be held accountable for unskillful behavior.  We also need to be careful about using karma to blame victims for their own circumstances.  It’s been misused in Asian history to rationalize injustice and societal oppression.  The message is that people born into poverty or disability deserve their situation because of misdeeds in past lives.  It’s a really harmful thing.

Blame might seem like a powerful response to our suffering.  It was all his fault, it wasn’t mine.  I didn’t do anything wrong.  The related message is that I don’t deserve my suffering.  When we think and say these things, they might make us feel stronger, but actually, these are not positions of strength.  They reinforce our habits of looking away from suffering and ignoring where it comes from.  They also imply that we’re powerless to do anything about our suffering, and that we’re simply at the mercy of a cruel world.  Everything would have been fine if only THEY hadn’t said this or done that.  Well, yes, what they did might have been out of our control.  What’s not out of our control is our response to the discomfort we feel.

Now, that’s easy to say.  Maybe at some time in your life you’ve heard someone say that we can choose whether or not to be happy, or that no one else can make you feel a certain way.  The natural response is: I can’t help how I feel!  Without some guidance about how to understand how suffering arises—and how contentment arises—we continue to get tossed around by emotions.  Because we forget that the self is empty and it’s just five skandhas clinging to five skandhas, we feel threatened and get defensive—and then we look for someone else to blame.

Instead, if we can commit to seeing what’s arising for us, seeing that it’s based on delusion about the nature of self, we can cut off an unskillful response at the roots.  Why do we feel the need to blame someone else?  What’s the fear that’s at the bottom of that?

Also, there are myriad causes and conditions for everything that arises and everything that happens.  The person or circumstance we’re blaming is in the midst of countless dynamics.  We’re only seeing the affect on ourselves, but there’s much more going on than that and we need to keep the broadest view.  I’m one small piece of the total picture of this moment.  That doesn’t mean that I and my suffering are not important.  They’re just not the whole story.

Now, what does this mean in the context of our individual practice?

In this dharma family, the approach has been that we are responsible for our own practice.  As Uchiyama Roshi just said, Ultimately, development and backsliding depend only on you.  We can find lots of excuses not to practice: we’re too tired, too busy, too old, whatever.  We’re kind of blaming our circumstances.  

When I was leading the Milwaukee Zen Center, sometimes sangha members would apologize for not attending regularly and give some reason, as though they were injuring or insulting me somehow by not being around!  I always said two things:
1) I’m not taking attendance or keeping score.  Be here as your life permits . . . but 
2) We make time for the things we think are important.  When your practice becomes important to you and you’re committed to it, you will have time to practice.  The responsibility is yours.

Okumura Roshi has often told the story of his ordination with Uchiyama Roshi, who said he never encourages anyone to ordain because being a monk is difficult and there are a lot of meaningless people already in robes.  However, if Okumura Roshi wanted to be a true practitioner of zazen, he would do the ceremony.  Okumura Roshi said. “I still appreciate his reply to my request—it left me no room for making excuses or shifting blame.”  No one had talked him into this, so when things got tough, that wasn’t someone else’s fault.

And after that, when Okumura Roshi’s father met with Uchiyama Roshi on the day of the ordination, he said, by way of a standard Japanese expression of gratitude, “Please take care of my son.”  Uchiyama Roshi said he couldn’t do that and that the young man had to practice by himself and walk on his own legs.

To this day, in this dharma family, during zazen the teacher sits facing the wall like everyone else.  Uchiyama Roshi said he never faces his disciples: he faces the Buddha and walks in that direction as his own practice.  If others want to practice with him they should also face the Buddha and go in the same direction with their own feet.  Okumura Roshi has always tried to follow his example by relying on the teachings and not on the teacher.

However, what about when a few of those living beings really, really seem to be at fault for what’s wrong in our lives or in the world?  It’s not easy to just turn on our loving-kindness is it?  That’s because blame is related to anger.  Trying not to blame others for our suffering is not the same as expecting them to take responsibility for their actions.  We can work on discerning the causes of suffering without doing that in the midst of anger and ill will, though this is not easy.

We can start by remembering that the real problem is ignorance.  When people don’t understand how the world really works and what the self really is, they take unskillful action.  That action and the resulting conflict is frequently based on the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance.  We all fall prey to the three poisons sometimes, and we all make mistakes.  

Myriad unknowable causes and conditions have resulted in a person resorting to unwholesome action and perpetuating suffering for others.  There are responses wired into the primative parts of the brain having to do with craving and fear and agression.  Those things may be amplified by our temperaments, our families of origin and our culture.  The person we’re blaming didn’t choose any of that.  These universal challenges of the human condition don’t belong to any one person.  The person we’re blaming is not the sole instance of craving and aversion.  It’s not his/her/their ignorance or greed, it’s the ignorance and greed of the human condition.  

Maybe we can cultivate a bit of compassion for someone hijacked by his delusions and acting out of fear.  If so, then we can still have benevolence toward him and wish him well.  In a previous week, we said that for a bodhisattva, wishing someone well means wishing him liberation from suffering and the three poisons.  We can wish for anybody that he/she/they will wake up and see clearly, even if this isn’t someone we personally like.

We can also remember that we don’t always know someone’s motivation.  We’ve heard many times that something done with the best of intentions can go awry and cause harm.  As bodhisattvas, we take responsibility for what we do; this is why we have vow and repentance.  That’s how we take care of this dynamic; people outside of the sangha may not have a way of understanding about this and we need to be patient.

Again, blaming someone and holding him accountable are not the same thing.  Blame comes with ill will, or at least with ignorance.  Holding someone accountable doesn’t cut off the relationship.  Blame says I want to be separate from you.  Accountability says we’re interconnected because we can’t help it and now we have to figure out how to work together.  That’s working for living beings

So, rather than blaming others for things, maybe we can point to ignorance as the real culprit.  If we do that, there aren’t human enemies, there are only a lot of confused people in the world who need help.  That’s where our bodhisattva vows come in.  We can continue to work for living beings even if we don’t agree with what they do.

No self-deception is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not praise ourselves.
報恩是法明門、不欺負他故.

You may recognize “praising ourselves” as one half of the seventh precept against praising self and disparaging or slandering others—and sure enough, next week’s gate is about not blaming others.

The Bonmokyo says about this precept: If a bodhisattva boasts of his own virtue and conceals the good works of others, thus causing them to be slandered, the person thereby commits a bodhisattva parajika offense.  You are getting something for yourself in a less than honest way that puts someone else at a disadvantage.  

We made a start on considering self-deception several weeks ago when we considered Gate 25:  Truth is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not deceive ourselves.  We saw that when we really see truth, or when we really see the world through the lens of Buddha’s teaching, we can’t deceive ourselves.  Sometimes we’d like to believe that things aren’t the way they are, that the things we love will never leave us, that zazen will turn us into people we like better, or that we are separate from others and what we do doesn’t affect other people.  However, if we’re really seeing clearly, we know that these ideas aren’t sustainable, and that if we live and act on the basis of them, we and others will suffer.

We’ve seen here the difference between acceptance and approval.  As bodhisattvas, we have to accept that there is suffering and what the cause of that suffering is.  That doesn’t mean suffering is OK or that we condone unskillful behavior.  To ignore suffering or any part of our lives is self-deception.

Today’s gate says that one of the things that happens when we deceive ourselves is that we praise ourselves.  The Sanskrit term for pride, arrogance or conceit is Māna.  It creates the basis for disrespecting others and for the occurrence of suffering.  Sometimes the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance are referred to as the five poisons or five kleshas when they include pride or arrogance, as well as envy or jealousy.   Māna is usually translated as pride, but the basis of the word is about measuring.  The problem is comparing ourselves with others, whether we come out on top or not.

This gate is not saying that we shouldn’t have healthy egos.  There’s nothing wrong with being happy that you got an A on your final or gave a great performance or won the game.  When your friends and family say congratulations, it’s not necessary to be falsely modest or diminish your accomplishment.  Pride becomes an issue when it becomes the basis for demeaning others.

The teachings in these two gates are about competition.  To compete is to get something for yourself by establishing that you’re better than other people who want the same thing.  The teaching here is not that competition is never necessary or always bad.  There’s plenty of competition in nature for food, mates or territory; that’s how species survive.  People need to compete sometimes for jobs or scholarships.  Resources are limited and there has to be a way to establish the best fit.

The problems start when we are caught up in competition based on self clinging and separation.  If we’ve fallen prey to these two things, we don’t understand the nature of self, or we’re choosing to ignore it.  In other words, we’re deceiving ourselves.  In an unskillful competition, we have to build ourselves up while at the same time tearing others down.  That’s why today we’re dealing with praising self.

Buddha tells us that there are three things that are true about existence:
1) that everything is part of the network of interdependent origination­— nothing arises on its own, but because of causes and conditions
2) that everything is impermanent because those causes and conditions are constantly changing, so what arises from them has to be changing too
3) there is no fixed self-nature because we’re subject to the same interdependence and impermanence as everything else

No fixed self nature means that the self is empty.  The self is simply a collection of elements that comes together for some finite period of time.  We give it a name and believe that we are the same people from birth through today to our eventual death.  However, there is nothing we can point to and say this is my permanent self.  We aren’t the same people that we were five minutes ago or five years ago.  We’ve had experiences, learned things and created memories.  Some breaths have gone in and out and some blood moved around.  We’ve digested some food and created some waste.  What part of this shifting, impermanent collection of five skandhas can we point to and say, this is me?  The same is true of all conditioned things; they have no fixed and permanent self-nature.

On one hand, we need to feel that there is some continuity in our state of being so that we can function in the world and be psychologically healthy.  On the other hand, in the universal sense, there is no self.  Understanding this is crucial to our zazen practice and it’s written into Sanshin’s practice vision in the Six Points.  The first one is the study of the meaning of zazen in the context of Buddha’s teachings, understanding the common thread that runs from the teachings of Shakyamuni through the Mahayana tradition, the teachings of Dogen Zenji, Sawaki and Uchiyama Roshis, down to Okumura Roshi and the practice of shikantaza at Sanshin today.

When Shakyamuni realized awakening under the bodhi tree, he knew directly that clinging is the cause of suffering.  He saw that we try to gratify sense desires by grasping at things we think are desirable.  That’s dangerous because the loss of that desirable object is inevitable and we suffer.  The escape from this cycle of greed and fear is in taking up the Eightfold Path.

One of the things to which we cling most readily is the five skandhas or aggregates that make up the concept we call “me.”  In the Pali Canon, the Buddha talked about the five skandhas as they relate to praising self: 
If one regards himself superior or equal or inferior by reason of the body that is impermanent, painful and subject to change, what else is it than not seeing reality? Or if one regards himself superior or equal or inferior by reason of feelings, perceptions, volitions or consciousness, what else is it than not seeing reality? If one does not regard himself superior or equal or inferior by reason of the body, the feelings, perceptions, volitions or consciousness what else is it than seeing reality?

The five skandhas aren’t a reliable basis for comparing ourselves with others.  One aspect of seeing clearly is to understand the nature of self, and thus the need to praise ourselves doesn’t arise.  Somehow we need to understand how five skandhas can be released from clinging to five skandhas.  Again, as we saw a few weeks ago, with the three marks of existence Buddha taught that all conditioned things are empty of a fixed and permanent self nature because of both interdependence and impermanence.  Everything arises because of causes and conditions; nothing comes into being by itself, so nothing can be separate from everything else around it (interdependence).  Because these causes and conditions are changing all the time, the things that arise from them must also be changing (impermanence).  If everything is connected to everything else and changing all the time, there’s nothing we can identify as a permanent self-nature or essence—and Buddha’s teaching about emptiness must include this group of five skandhas called “me.”  

This is also the teaching of the Prajna Paramita literature in the Mahayana tradition.  The Heart Sutra says, “Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing prajna paramita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering.”  The five skandhas being free from clinging to five skandhas on the basis of emptiness is the equivalent of Dogen Zenji’s shinjin datsuraku (dropping off body and mind), Sawaki Roshi’s “zazen is good for nothing,” Uchiyama Roshi’s “opening the hand of thought,” and Okumura Roshi’s “1=0=∞ (infinity).”  This is what we actualize in shikantaza, which has been handed down to us directly from generation to generation.  This is zazen in the context of Buddha’s teachings

In zazen we give up clinging to the five skandhas because we only do four things in zazen: take the posture, keep eyes open, breathe deeply and let go of thought.  That means we let go of all thought, including ideas about who we are and what the self is.  There’s no room to hold into ideas about the five skandhas because those four things we do in zazen take up the entire space.  Zazen is the five skandhas ceasing to cling to the five skandhas.

If we’re not clinging to ideas about self, we can’t deceive ourselves.  Sawaki Roshi said that “Religion” is to live out the ever fresh self, which is not deceived by anything.  If we’re seeing clearly, we can’t help but see that this heap of five skandhas that arises fresh moment by moment is no better or worse than any other heap of five skandhas.  We don’t need to brag about ourselves in order to impress other people or impress ourselves.  When we do that, we’re reinforcing the idea that there is a fixed self that needs to be defended or enhanced.  That’s when we start to compete for stuff.  I want to get more things to prove that I’m better than you or at least good enough, and I do that to defend or enhance this idea of self.  It’s a vicious circle: I want to get more stuff so I look good so I can get more stuff so I can look good.

That kind of competition, greed and clinging is based on fear—fear that somehow this small self isn’t enough or is in danger of being annihilated.  I need to take up the biggest possible space so that people will either admire me or be afraid of me, but in any case no one will attack me.  It’s a self-esteem issue.

Even when we feel successful, we still keep comparing ourselves to others.  Even when we feel pretty good and are praising ourselves, that’s a temporary circumstance because all things are impermanent.  Then have to look for another way to shore up sense of self.  It’s not a basis for lasting content or peace.

Comparing is a natural human tendency, and it’s pretty deeply rooted in our psychology.  We don’t have to be ashamed of it, but we do have the opportunity to watch it arise and decide whether it’s the skillful response to this moment.

Now, of course, there’s also an absolute view of this problem of praising self.  The self can’t be annihilated because there is no self with a beginning and an end.  Within this one unified reality, nothing is separate from anything else.  If so, then you can’t separate out something to praise which is more or less valuable than anything else.  If you’re drinking a cup of coffee, it’s pretty hard to say, well, this section of the coffee in my cup is better than that one.  There’s just coffee, beyond any comparison.

When we talked about kindness, we said it was about wishing well to all beings equally.  We can’t make distinctions between wishing well for these folks but not for those folks, because we’re not really separate.  If we really understand our nonseparation, then there’s no comparing or measuring, and desire to praise self doesn’t arise.  Okumura Roshi says: 
There is no gate, no entrance, and no way to come in or go out.  From the time of the Big Bang, nothing is added and nothing is taken out.  Within time and space, things are coming and going, arising and perishing, but nothing is coming from outside and nothing goes out from this universe.  

In my case, I was born in 1948 and now I am 71 and I may disappear sometime in the future.  This is my lifetime from birth to death, but my life is not limited to this time.  My life is a continuation from my parents’ lives and, spiritually, my life is a continuation from Shakyamuni Buddha and my teacher.  My life will continue even after my death.  In that sense, I never came in through the gate and I will never go out through the gate.  I am always here, and all beings are the same.  There is no separation between ourselves and others.  When we really awaken to that reality, there is no way to praise only this collection of five skandhas and look down on other collections of five skandhas. 

Sawaki Roshi said we need to give up our tendency to compare ourselves with others and just return to our actual selves in zazen.  Sit firmly in the place beyond any question of whether you are great or not.  This is what happens when we let go of thought.  The yardstick disappears and we can’t measure ourselves against others.

The yardstick can be very subtle and we don’t always notice when we’re praising ourselves.  Sometimes we just do it internally when we’re not trying to compete with others.  I did a good deed, and therefore I’m a good person; I feel good about myself, or, I’m really doing great practice, saving a lot of beings!  I’m joining online zazen every morning and memorizing Dogen quotes and I’ve created a whiz-bang home altar!

That’s all great, but we don’t need to say so.  We have to watch our motivations for our actions, because we can do good things partly so we can praise ourselves.  Then on the basis of doing a wholesome thing, some unwholesomeness can arise

Okumura Roshi wrote: When we create twisted karma with our good deeds, people are usually happy and praise us, and we in turn are proud of our actions. In these cases, perceiving the deep and subtle self-centeredness within our benevolence can be very difficult. This is why our practice of zazen as repentance is significant. In zazen, we cannot hide from ourselves. As the Kan-fugen-bosatsu-gyo-ho-kyo says, “If you wish to make repentance, sit upright and be mindful of the true reality.”

In zazen, we can’t hide from ourselves or deceive ourselves.  We let go of thoughts about who we are and how great we are.  We stop trying to perpetuate the stories about our own importance.

Repayment of kindness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not cheat and disregard others.
報恩是法明門、不欺負他故.

Now that we’ve considered recognition of kindness, we’ll consider repayment of kindness.  Last week we said that on an individual level, kindness was wishing wellbeing for others.  More universally, it’s about the support we receive from all beings or the universe just to live and go about our daily activities.  Recognizing kindness means we have to know what kindness is in ourselves and others so that the unfolding of that kindness can come to fruition.

I also introduced the idea that recognizing and acknowledging debts of kindness is a critically important aspect of Asian culture.  This is repaying the debt of gratitude.  In Confucan cultures, everyone has duties to everyone else: your parents, children, boss, employees, society, the state.  When Buddhism arrived and encouraged people to leave home, cut ties and join the sangha, it created real conflict: who was going to take care of your responsibilities if you became a Buddhist and left home?

There was also a sense that the current family, business or state of the world was a connection between past and future.  People now had an obligation to take on the heritage that they received from their ancestors, take care of it, and hand it on to the next generation.  Thus arose the problem of disconnection when people left home to join the sangha.  How were they to repay their debts?

In response, Buddhists began to emphasize teachings about filial piety.  Practice was not for oneself, but to liberate all beings, including all those to whom one had responsibiilties.  Becoming a monk was positioned as beneficial for one’s family and for society, and as an acceptable means of repaying the debt of gratitude.  Within Buddhism, practice was also a means of repaying one’s debt to the Three Treasures.

This was relevant for lay practitioners as well.  While monks were concentrating on practice, laypeople were carrying out their occupations.  That daily work was a means of repaying the debt to Buddha and all living beings.  Last time I mentioned Suzuki Shosan’s teachings on how each occupation is Buddha’s work.  Much of his written teaching is about how everyone owes a debt of gratitude to each of the four classes of society—samurai, artisans, farmers and merchants—and also how engaging in each of these occupations is Buddha’s work and repays one’s debt to Buddha.

Samurai’s work is practice because they get to study death.  The courage they needed to face death was the same courage needed to enter the Buddha Way.  They had the opportunity to become aware of their fears about death and to see how those come about.  Being fearless because you understand the nature of death is not the same as being fearless because you’re not acknowledging that death is coming,

Being an artisan is Buddha’s work when it’s done with sincere attention and the understanding that it’s a complete manifestation of buddha nature.  To do that, you have to have faith that buddha nature already exists, so that’s not as easy as it sounds.

Merchants traditionally were a low-ranking class, even though they were necessary to society.  Shosan says it’s fine to be a merchant and make a profit, and that being a merchant is practice to the degree that it’s done without greed.  Buying and selling without clinging reinforces understanding, and that reinforces wholesome behavior.  If you make a lot of money, good for you—as long as it’s being done ethically.

Finally, he says farmers have been entrusted by the universe to feed everybody, even though it’s physically difficult work.  To grow food, you have to be patient and calm and see clearly what’s happening with your plants and animals, so this is Buddha’s work as well.

One way to say "please" in Japanese is お願いしますonegaishimasu, literally something like "please do me a favor."  There’s some subtlety about this that implies that it’s not enough to recognize that we’ve received kindness or support and to feel grateful.  We’re obligated to repay it—but we can’t possibly repay this huge debt, so it’s like the four vows in that it’s a lifelong practice.  There’s one unified reality within which causes and conditions enable the arising of individuals and what they do.  We’re indebted to the universe for our birth, and simply living our lives and doing our jobs to the best of our ability is a means of repayment.  When things change and we get better jobs or more comfortable circumstances, that’s fine—we just do those thing with the same heart and mind.

In the Shushogi, Dogen says: In our continuous day-to-day practice and moment to moment study, simply following the Buddha Way is the true way of fulfilling our filial piety . . . We should see that our debts of gratitude to all living beings are as important as [the debt to our own parents]. (3-15)

It’s easy to see how we owe a debt of gratitude to our parents, even though our personal relationship may or may not be good.  It’s easier to forget that we’re supported by beings and circumstances that are farther removed and that we don’t know about.  These are as important to our circumstances as our parents, and need the same kind of attention.  However, by simply doing our best to be wholehearted in each moment, we begin to take care of our debt to all beings.

Another more concrete way that repaying the debt of gratitude shows up in our practice is the making of offerings.  We put flowers, candles and food on the altar, and we also offer the merit of our good deeds to others. 

The bodhisattva recognizes debt of kindness to all beings and thus aspires to liberate everyone.  One way is to give away the beneficial results or karmic fruits of the good things we do.  We cultivate prajna, sila and samadhi, or wisdom, morality and concentration, and dedicate the merit to all living beings.  Traditionally you can accumulate merit in your practice by:

• chanting sutras and dharanis
• mindfully reciting buddha names
• circumambulating stupas
• making prostrations and offerings to buddhas on altars
• anything that either expresses gratitude to Buddha or spreads the dharma

During liturgy we give that merit away by reciting an eko 回向, or verse for the dedication of merit.  Ekos have a structure in which they (1) state how the merit was generated, (2) name the recipient(s) of the merit, and (3) explain the hoped-for outcome of the merit transference.  For example:

Having chanted the Maka Hannya Haramitta Shingyo, in gratitude for receiving boundless 
compassionate gifts, we reverently offer the merit of our chanting to:
The Great Founding Teacher, Shakyamuni Buddha;
our first ancestor in Japan, Great Teacher Eihei Dogen;
the Eminent Ancestor, Great Teacher Keizan Jokin;
the successive ancestors who transmitted the light of Dharma, and to the eternal Three Treasures in the ten directions.
We also offer it to the guardian deities of this temple and to all Dharma-protecting devas and good spirits.
May the true Dharma flourish in the ten directions, may all nations dwell together in harmony, may peace and tranquility pervade this sangha, and may all beings live together joyfully.
 
Here’s another example.

May the Three Treasures illuminate our awakening in practice.
Having chanted the Dai Hi Shin Darani, we dedicate this merit to the deceased monks throughout the Dharma realm; and to— [names of those who have died];  may they know rest and attain Buddhahood;
to— [names of those who are ill]; may they know comfort and peace;
to the founding patrons of this temple, and to sentient beings throughout the Dharma Realm.
May they perfect awakening in Buddha’s Way.

It may seem a little strange to us as Westerners to be offering merit to buddhas and ancestors.  These folks lived hundreds or a couple of thousand years ago, and now they’re dead.  They’re not here to know what we’re doing, and it feels worshipful.  And yet, without them, we wouldn’t be practicing today.  We wouldn’t know how to sit, and we wouldn’t have teachings.  Whether or not you believe that something has been transmitted from teacher to disciple and that I’m literally 84th in line from Shakyamuni, we have instructions and guidance in the practice from somewhere.

In the Shushogi, Dogen says: That we are now able to see the Buddha and hear the dharma is due to the blessings that have come to us through the practice of every one of the buddhas and ancestors. If the buddhas and ancestors had not directly transmitted the dharma, how could it have reached us today?

In talking about debts of kindness, in the largest sense, there is no person in debt, no offering to be made and no debtor.  None of these things can be separate from each other because they’re all part of an interconnected system.  We’re offering ourselves to ourselves.

Whatever we’re accumulating and giving away is already part of the functioning of the same universe that gave rise to us in the first place.  Does the wave owe a debt of gratitude to the ocean?  In one way yes, because the ocean gave rise to the wave.  In another way no, because the ocean is just doing what its causes and conditions lead it to do.  That’s the view we take when we can see past our delusions of being separate.  On a moment-to-moment basis, however, we forget that we’re not separate.  Repaying the debt of gratitude helps us to remember and to see more clearly.  We don’t disregard our connections with other beings.

How do we cheat others when we ignore our debts of kindness?  To cheat is to behave dishonestly in order to gain an advantage.  We’re doing something that’s not in accord with reality, and the result is that someone else has some unfavorable circumstance.  The opposite of that is our old friend dana, or generosity.  Okumura Roshi says: Dana is a practice that allows us to be free from self-clinging based on the three poisonous minds. This practice benefits both giver and receiver, and the gift is also free from the three poisonous minds. Thus, our activities simply become one with the circulation of the myriad dharmas that are always coming and going within the Dharma world. We simply refrain from blocking such a circulation by ceasing to create a wall between ourselves and all others.

We could say that when we ignore our interconnections and our debt of kindness, we create an artificial roadblock that disrupts the flow of things within this reality.  We create separation that keeps all beings from receiving what they need from us.  In other words, we cheat them and put them at a disadvantage, thinking we’re gaining something or at least not losing something.

Imagine the blood flow in your body between your organs.  Each organ does something that benefits the body.  If the heart believed that it was separate and didn’t owe anything to the other organs or to the body as a whole and it stopped the flow of blood, the other organs would be cheated of nourishment they need.  The heart would also suffer because the blood wasn’t being purified or oxygenated elsewhere in the body.  We can choose to ignore our interconnections, but then everybody suffers.

When we’re free from greed, anger and ignorance, we’re free from selfishness.  That benefits the being that’s giving and the being that’s receiving.  Because we’re always engaged in a mutual exchange with all beings, that means our unselfishness benefits everyone.  If we disregard others, as this gate says, we fail to recognize kindness, so there’s no way we can repay our debt.  We already know we can’t repay all our debts of gratitude in this lifetime, and it’s even more impossible when we disregard them!

Thus in order to repay our debts of kindness, we have to be free from greed.  Maybe we usually think about greed and generosity as related to giving something to someone who needs help, someone who is less fortunate than we are.  We think about giving to charity, or giving to the local dharma center.  Maybe we think about sharing what we have with people we love, our family and friends.  In all those cases, we’re in the superior position.  We have something, and we’re giving to someone who doesn’t have whatever it is.  Maybe we even give because we want to impress, gain love or even greater debt for someone else.

How about giving when we’re the ones who owe something?  Now we don’t have the upper hand.  We don’t think of that as giving, but as obligation.  If we repay a debt grudgingly, we resent what we owe and that we owe.  Can we repay kindness with openheartedness?  Can I freely offer my daily work to the universe simply because the universe is supporting me?  Can I sit shikantaza and chant and bow and offer the merit simply because Buddha gave me this practice to do?  Can I accept that I will always owe a debt of kindness to all beings, and then freely work for their liberation as a bodhisattva?

If I can recognize kindness for what it is and repay my debts of kindness, then I actively participate in the reality that is the network of interdependent origination.  If I choose to ignore the network, it doesn’t go away; I just become an obstruction to the way it functions.  Okumura Roshi says: Each and every action we perform as a practice of the bodhisattva vows is connected to everything in the past, present and future. Therefore, even our small offerings given with sincere hearts have a connection with all beings in all the six realms, including heaven realms, human realms, and the realms of all sages such as buddhas and bodhisattvas. Each and every action, no matter how small, resonates with all beings in the past, present and future. This is what Dogen means when he says, “Whether we give or receive, we connect ourselves with all beings throughout the world.” When either giving or receiving, by letting go of egocentricity and being giving or receiving, we go beyond the separation of self and all other beings. We then actively participate in the network of interdependent origination.

Here, Okumura Roshi and Dogen are reiterating that what we do connects with all beings throughout space and time.  What we do resonates with all beings in the past, present and future.  We need pay attention to our place in that chain.

A few minutes ago I pointed out that traditionally there was the feeling that we’ve inherited what we have from the past, and we’re responsible for handing that off into the future.  Thus everyone has a responsibility to maintain our lineage and tradition, whatever form that takes in our lives.  We need to preserve the legacy.  When it comes to practice, you don’t have to be a teacher to play a part in passing on the legacy of the dharma.  The Kataññu Sutta says the debt we owe our parents is too large to be paid back in material ways.  If children were to carry their parents on their backs their entire lives, or let them be kings and queens of the country, it wouldn’t be enough.  Buddha says it’s only possible to repay one’s gratitude by teaching them Buddhism through spiritual qualities.  He’s not saying we should teach them how to practice, or convince them to become Buddhists.  He’s saying we should set a good example for parents and everyone by living in a wholesome way and demonstrating good qualities that arise from your practice: wisdom, morality, generosity, compassion, concentration, diligence, contentment, etc.  If we’re going to be good examples, we need to practice ourselves to enable that.  Again, doing our practice is in itself repaying our debt of kindness to Buddha and all beings.

The recognition of kindness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not throw away good roots.
三歸是法明門、淨三惡道故.

This week we look at recognition of kindness, and next week it’s repayment of kindness.  These two gates are related.

We’ve got three elements to talk about in this gate: kindness, the recognition of kindness, and connection with good roots.  Metta, or the perfection of loving kindness, is one of the ten perfections in the Pali canon.  The list looks different in the Mahayana tradition, but still includes loving-kindness: giving, morality, renunciation, wisdom, diligence, patience, truthfulness, determination, loving-kindness, and equanimity.

As a side note, kindness is subtly different from compassion.  Compassion is entering into someone else’s suffering and feeling with that person.  As bodhisatvas, we want to liberate all beings because we feel their pain.  Kindness is wishing happiness and wellbeing for others.  As bodhisattvas, we show benevolence to all beings without any thought of reward or gain for ourselves.

This isn’t the first time we’ve considered a gate related to kindness.  When we were talking about the bramaviharas or four divine abodes, the one covered by Gate 14 was benevolence or loving-kindness: Benevolence is gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] good roots prevail in all the situations of life.  Buddha says loving-kindness reverses anger and greed, but that this will take some time because anger and ill-will are pretty deep-seated.  The three poisons are basic to our delusion.

Even when we aspire to kindness, have trouble sustaining it.  We get it intellectually, we know what we want to do, but gosh, we keep falling off the wagon.  There’s an dismaying element of limitlessness associated with kindness.  Buddha says we have to have loving-kindness for all beings, not just our friends and people we like.  In the Mahaparinirvana Sutra, Buddha says we haven’t reached great or limitless loving-kindness until we experience it equally for everyone:  If one does not feel anger even towards a single being and prays to give bliss to such a being, this is loving-kindness.  It’s easy to experience for ourselves and our loved ones, and harder for strangers and impossible for people we hate!  In the sutra, Buddha says we are really practicing loving-kindness when we don’t see wrongs and anger doesn’t arise.  We stop seeing what others do as personal affronts to ourselves or attacks on our egos.  If we don’t take stuff personally, we don’t get angry.

Both Gate 14 and this gate associate kindness and roots:
14) Benevolence is gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] good roots prevail in all the situations of life.
[28] Recognition of kindness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not throw away good roots.
I’m guessing these are connected to the line in the Mahaparinirvana Sutra that says, If any person asks about the root of any aspect of good, say that it is lovingkindness.

All the wholesomeness in the world is based on kindness.  Whatever good is happening is because of wishing happiness and wellbeing for others.  For bodhisattvas, kindness can intersect with compassion; we’re wishing wellbeing for others and that means wanting them to be able to liberate themselves from suffering.  For the bodhisattva, wishing others well is not hoping their cravings for diamond rings and cherry pie are fulfilled.  It’s wishing they have wisdom, compassion and insight so they can cut through delusion and wholesome circumstances can arise.  This is how we talked about kindness back at Gate 14.

This week’s gate says we have to recognize kindness so we don’t throw away those good roots.  We have to know what kindness is in ourselves and others so that the unfolding of that kindness can come to fruition.  

Recognizing and acknowledging debts of kindness is a critically important aspect of Asian culture.  It’s not so important in Indian Buddhism, but started to become important when Buddhism arrived in China and then Japan.  Confucianism was already there in China, and one of the central virtues was filial piety.  That meant that children had to take care of their parents as they got older and after they died.  They also had obligations to social superiors and to the state.

In a Confucian society, everyone had duties to everyone else: parents and children, bosses and employees, older or higher rank to younger or lower rank.  It started in the home and reached outward to larger and larger rings of social groups, and all behavior was determined by mutual obligations.  It was the source of the culture’s ethical system.  Every day one lived, one accumulated more debts of gratitude.  

Then Buddhism arrived and encouraged people to leave home, cut family ties and join the sangha.  This was a big problem.  If a son becomes a monk, who takes care of the parents?  If your family had a trade or business that had been going on for generations, who was going to carry that on and continue to improve and expand those activities?  Who carries out all the social obligations, one of which was to have children who would continue to keep society going?

There was also a sense that everyone owed his identity to the family or business or social group that had been created by previous generations.  Your worth wasn’t based on your personal achievements or accomplishments, but on the reputation of your group.  You were able to function in the world because of your parents’ wealth or social class, or because you had been appointed to a particular job.  You were indebted to others for your sense of self.

Thus there was a real conflict: Buddhism looked to the Chinese like an irresponsible foreign religion because the sangha cut ties with society.  The general belief was that if individual households were run properly, then ultimately the state would be run properly.  Peace and prosperity for the entire country rested on the condition of the family household.

Buddhist practitioners started to emphasize teachings on debts of gratitude.  They said that it wasn’t that monks were abandoning their responsibilities, but that their practice was for the liberation and wellbeing of all beings, including their parents and the emperor.  They also generated merit that they dedicated to dead relatives and ancestors.  They were taking care of their social obligations, but in a different way.

As Buddhism continued to develop in East Asia, some additional teachings arose that helped to resolve the conflict.  One was that because of interconnectedness, all beings have been our parents at one time or another.  Our practice is to liberate all beings, and if all beings have been our parents, then we recognize that we owe all beings a debt of kindness.  Dogen wrote a poem that said, Those fellows who stray around in delusion here and there, within the six realms, are actually my fathers and my mothers.

Those fellows who stray around in delusion here and there are us—everyday people who get caught up in our stuff and pulled around by our desires and our suffering.  Because of that, we wander continuously around the six realms of samsara.  Dogen says that all average normal people are actually his fathers and mothers, and maybe this felt really important to him because he lost both his parents when he was a young child.  

In the Bonmokyo or Brahma Net Sutra, which is one of our source texts for the precepts, it says that if we don’t recognize our debt of kindness to our parents, we break a minor precept:

A disciple of the Buddha should have a mind of compassion and cultivate the practice of liberating sentient beings. He must reflect thus: throughout the eons of time, all male sentient beings have been my father, all female sentient beings my mother . . . On the day his father, mother, and siblings die, he should invite Dharma Masters to explain the Bodhisattva sutras and precepts. This will generate merits and virtues and help the deceased either to achieve rebirth in the Pure Lands and meet the buddhas or to secure rebirth in the human or celestial realms. If instead, a disciple fails to do so, he commits a secondary offense.

This is a reference to what still happens today at a funeral or memorial for a layperson.  Among other things, we chant the Shushogi, a compilation of Dogen’s teachings that includes how and why we should receive the precepts, and at the end, officiant gives a few minutes’ dharma talk.  All that is based on this precept and the teaching that we owe our parents for their blessings even after they die.

Dogen says that we should treat all beings the way we treat our parents, and that’s the basis of our bodhisattva work.  He says that laypeople respect and care for their parents while they are alive and hold services for them after their death, but:

Monks abandon their debt of gratitude and enter the realm of non-doing (mui). Within the family of non-doing, the manner [of paying off the debt of gratitude] should not be limited to one particular person. Considering that we have debts of gratitude to all living beings just as we do to our own fathers and mothers, we must transmit all the merits of our good deeds throughout the dharma-world. We don’t limit [the dedication] specifically to our own parents in this lifetime. This is the way we do not go against the Way of non-doing.

Depending on place and time and what sutra you’re reading, Buddhism says we owe a debt of kindness or debt of gratitude to four benefactors.  There are various lists of who or what these are, including parents, all sentient beings, rulers, Three Treasures; mother, father, Buddha, teacher; and, in the first list I ever learned, parents, teachers, leaders and homeland.  We recite the list in the formal meal chant when we make a food offering.  First this is for the Three Treasures, next for the four benefactors, finally for the beings in the six realms; may all be equally nourished.

As an aside, last week we talked about the three devotions, which was about taking refuge in the three treasures.   We said that this idea of taking refuge goes back to India before Buddha. and that originally it meant declaring allegiance to a powerful person, like a patron.  You did what the patron told you to do in exchange for receiving protection from various dangers.

In the early years of the Buddha’s teaching career, his new followers adopted this custom and express their allegiance to the three treasures in a similar way.  It’s easy to see how the three treasures were included in these later teachings about debts of kindness in cultures that operated based on mutual responsibility.  People in medieval Asia were used to having lords, masters or patrons.  You were expected to be loyal, and in return you received protection.  It makes sense that the three treasures or your Buddhist teacher took on a similar role.

Anyway, the point is that we say that we’re indebted to four benefactors because we can’t exist without the support of other things and people.  Everything is dependent on causes and conditions.  This is why we keep hearing about no-separation.  Nothing exists on its own; it arose from something else, and it’s interconnected.  

Recognition of kindness is another way of saying recognition of interconnectedness.  There was a Japanese monk called Suzuki Shosan who lived in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.  He had an interesting, eclectic Buddhist life after being a samurai warrior.  He practiced in various Buddhist traditions, was a close friend of a Soto Zen monk, and established about 30 Soto Zen temples, but was ordained in another tradition.  He developed his own style of practice unlike Soto Zen.

Much of his written teaching is about how everyone owes a debt of gratitude to each of the four classes of society—samurai, artisans, farmers and merchants—and also how engaging in each of these occupations repays one’s debt to Buddha.  

The one Buddha, the Tathagata originally awakened, benefits the world by dividing himself into countless millions of parts.  Without blacksmiths, carpenters, and all the other artisans, the needs of the world would never be satisfied. Without samurais, the world would not be governed.  Without farmers, it would not be fed, and without merchants, nothing in the world would circulate freely.  Any other occupation, as soon as it appears, begins to serve the world. There are men who have discussed of Heaven and Earth, there is the man who invented written language, and also the man who invented medicine, having differentiated five principal organs.  Although these achievements that have emerged in great multitude, exist for the benefit of the world, they are nothing but the manifestations of the grace of one Buddha in action.

Again we see the recognition of kindness as a recognition of interconnectedness.  There are individuals that are both receiving support from others and providing support through their daily activity, and there is also one unified reality or the Buddha way within which the individuals and their activities function, and that makes that functioning possible.  There’s one unified reality within which causes and conditions enable the arising of individuals and what they do.  We’re indebted to the universe for our birth in this form, and simply living our lives and carrying out our functions is a means of repayment.

When we look broadly at how causes and conditions and gratitude work, we get to see how things we didn’t really want in our lives actually sometimes turn out to be helpful.  Recognizing that we were suffering brought us to practice.  Social distancing during the pandemic resulted in Sanshin increasing its virtual programming ability more quickly than we planned.  Maybe you just took a wrong turn on your way somewhere and discovered a beautiful view or a shop you never would have seen otherwise.

Somehow the dharma, or the functioning of the universe, resulted in something good through no intention of our own.  We can’t take credit for that; it’s not a reward for the small self.  It’s a gift from the universe.  Now, what are we going to do with it?

We need to be on the lookout for kindness so we don’t throw away the good roots.  Out of the kindness of others or the support of the universe, something good and wholesome happens.  Recognizing that interconnection with all beings is both an opportunity to see clearly how things actually work and an expression of our understanding.

Next week we’ll talk about repaying all the kindness we receive from the universe.  We need to close the loop.

The Three Devotions are a gate of Dharma illumination; for they purify the three evil worlds.
三歸是法明門、淨三惡道故.

As always, first let’s look at the nature of the three devotions and then at their relationship to the three evil worlds.  The three devotions are about taking refuge in three treasures: Buddha, dharma, and sangha.  Buddha is the historical Buddha, but is also awakening itself.  Dharma is what Buddha taught, but is also the way things are or the way the universe works.  Sangha is the community of people who practice together, but also all beings.  Sometimes these are also called the three jewels or the three gems.  Gems are valuable and precious, but in ancient India they were also thought to have protective powers.  

When we hear the story of Buddha’s life, we hear that he attained awakening under the bodhi tree and then went to look for five men he’d practiced with before in order to share the dharma with them.  They accepted these teachings and became Buddha’s students.  This is when we can say that the three treasures were established—now there were a Buddha, the dharma and a sangha.

Dōgen Zenji says we take refuge in Buddha because Buddha is a good teacher, we take refuge in dharma because it’s good medicine, and we take refuge in sangha because it’s a group of good friends.  We need these things.
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The expression “to take refuge” is kie 帰依.  Ki 帰 means to return or go back and e 依 means to depend on.  Taking refuge means we take the three treasures as the main guide for how we live.  This idea of taking refuge goes back to India before Buddha.  Originally, it meant declaring allegiance to a powerful person, like a patron.  You did what the patron told you to do in exchange for receiving protection from various dangers.

In the early years of the Buddha’s teaching career, his new followers adopted this custom.  They expressed their allegiance to the Buddha, dharma and sangha, but in the Buddhist context this custom took on a new meaning.  Taking refuge in the Buddhist sense is not asking for the Buddha personally to intervene to provide protection, although we still face dangers from the three poisonous minds and we want freedom from those.  We’re committing to the three refuges and to our practice because we recognize that we create our own suffering.  We’re committing to cultivating wisdom and skillful intentions that keep suffering from arising, and following the teachings helps us do that.

During ceremonies like ryaku fusatsu, we chant the three refuges:

I take refuge in Buddha together with all beings, immersing body and mind deeply in the Way, awakening true mind.
I take refuge in dharma together with all beings, entering deeply the merciful ocean of Buddha’s Way.
I take refuge in sangha together with all beings, bringing harmony to everyone, free from hindrance.

We could spend a lot of time just taking apart this chant, but let’s look at it briefly.  Immersing body and mind reminds us that awakening is only manifested when we enact it moment by moment.  It’s not enough just to study intellectually what Buddha said and agree with it.  We have to completely embody it and completely awaken to this reality.  When we do that, our wisdom and compassion naturally manifest and we take skillful action.

We study the teachings not only in the form of what Buddha said but also in the form of the way the universe works or the way things are.  Yes, sometimes we study sutras or books, but we also pay attention to reality and immerse ourselves in that reality.  The reference to the ocean is a pointer toward taking the broadest possible perspective, letting go of thoughts and views that limit our ability to see clearly.

The words translated as “bringing harmony” actually mean “unify.”  We’re unified by the dharma, and that makes a collection of individuals into a community.  We don’t lose our individuality, but we see how we’re 
connected and functioning together.  If there’s no separation, then obstacles and hindrances don’t arise—or at least, they get resolved.

In taking refuge, we return to zazen and the three treasures when we lose our way; we can rely on them.  However. the three treasures aren’t something outside ourselves that we worship.  We’re simply recognizing that the three treasures and ourselves and all of reality are not separate.  The three treasures are absolute reality, and this is where we live—this is our shelter, because there’s nowhere else to go.  Dogen asks why we should have faith in the three treasures and answers that it’s because the three treasures are our final refuge.

All the same, it’s easy to lose sight of that and to turn to other things for comfort or refuge when we’re fearful.  There are lots of things we might look to to save us from misfortune or suffering.  Okumura Roshi has written that he thinks religion arises from two needs: to deal with our fears, and to figure out how to live together.  People two or three thousand years ago were no different.  Dogen points us to a very old Buddhist text called the Abhidharma-kosa which says:

Many people, fearing misfortune, take refuge in the ghosts enshrined in various mountains and forests.  This refuge is not genuine or respectable. By such refuge we cannot be released from suffering.  When we take refuge in the Buddha, dharma and sangha, we observe our life with wisdom, based on the Four Noble Truths. We know suffering, the cause of suffering and going beyond suffering forever.  We also know the Holy Eightfold Noble Path and go to the peacefulness of nirvana.  This taking refuge is most superior. This refuge is most respectable.  By this taking this refuge, we will surely be relieved from various sufferings.

People of that time turned to ghosts and other fantastic beings because they seemed to provide some way to have power over nature.  Folks wanted control over things they couldn’t control.  Buddhism says that if we take refuge in the three treasures instead, we learn about the real cause of our suffering and what to do about it.  We bring about our own suffering, and we can’t look to someone or something else to end it.

Okumura Roshi says: Not by simply worshipping something but by accepting this teaching, we know how suffering is created and how it can stop. That’s why taking refuge in Buddha, dharma and sangha is superior to worshipping a ghost.

It might seem like our suffering isolates us from others: I feel pain, and you don’t feel the same pain I do.  Sometimes it seems like no one is suffering except me, or that I’m alone in my suffering.  This individual self that’s suffering is part of the universal self, and that’s where we go for refuge.  We’re not actually alone, even when we’re in quarantine in our houses and we don’t see anyone else for weeks.  We’re always interconnected with this one unified reality and with the three treasures.

One aspect of the three treasures is ittai sanbo  一體三寶, or one body-three treasures.  It means that the three treasures aren’t actually separate; we can say that they’re three expressions of awakening.  However, it also points us back to interconnection and the reality that we and the three treasures are connected across space and time into one body.

We’re born, we live and we die within this one reality.  This reality is our home, so taking refuge in the three treasures is returning home and taking shelter there.  We’re giving up being pulled around by our ideas and delusions and returning to the way things actually are.  According to Uchiyama Roshi, taking refuge in the three treasures is how we come to have a settled life.  As we know, the great question of his life was how we balance peace and progress, how to have a settled life in the midst of the need for progress and development in modern times.

Because everything is always changing, we can’t rely on conditioned things forever.  We’d like to feel that having things, people or circumstances in our lives make our lives settled and stable, but of course they will all disappear eventually.  The three treasures that make up this one reality are all we can really rely on.

We do many things to protect the small self and enhance our self-concept, but all we can really do is take refuge in the three treasures and give up trying to protect the self.  Taking refuge implies that we stop revering the self and look instead to the three treasures.  Dogen says: What the Buddhist ancestors have authentically transmitted is reverence for Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. If we do not take refuge in them, we do not revere them and if we do not revere them we do not take refuge in them. (1)

Last week’s discussion of Gate 26 on dharma conduct pointed out that Dogen taught that having grandmotherly mind isn’t just about being kind to other people and taking care of them.  It’s about taking care of the three treasures by understanding that all actions—all our conduct—is the buddha dharma.  Dogen said: Be mindful of the Three Treasures as a parent would be mindful of an only child.  We have to pay attention to all of our actions as practice.

Dogen taught that practice and awakening are not two.  There is no awakening which is outside or of separate from our day to day activity, so because the three treasures are important to us, we handle them carefully.  In the Bonmokyo it says, Whenever a bodhisattva hears non-Buddhist or evil minded person direct even a single slanderous word at the Buddha, he experiences pain like that inflicted by three hundred spears piercing one heart.  The tenth precept is about not slandering the three treasures.  On one hand, we vow not to say bad things about them, not to say they’re evil or mistaken or harmful.  On the other hand, Okumura Roshi reminds us that it’s also an act of slandering the three treasures if we’re practicing for ourselves:

Even if we are trying to be good students of Buddha, if we try to do so for our own sake, even slightly, we slander the Three Treasures.  Still, if we stop practicing and sharing dharma with others, again we slander the Three Treasures.  We must examine what’s there inside of ourselves, what makes us behave, practice or act in this way, and if we find some defilement we have to let it go and make repentance.  That’s how our practice continues and our awakening ripens.

Even though we make vows and intend to do the right thing by the three treasures, we can still fall into delusion when we stop paying attention to our actions and motivations, or when our day-to-day activity becomes all about our craving and aversion and not about taking care of the three treasures.

Those three evil worlds in this week’s gate statement are the sanakudo 三惡道, or three lower realms of the rokudo 六道.  In this world of delusion or samsara we transmigrate constantly through the six realms (2).  The three lower realms are hungry ghosts, hell, and animals, or our old friends, the three poisonous minds of greed, anger and ignorance.  In the Ekottaragama Sutra it says, Beings who take refuge in Buddha do not fall into lower rebirth.  They cease from excess and dwell with humans and gods, and will arrive at nirvana.

Taking refuge in the three treasures, doing our practice, doing shikantaza, study and beneficial action, allows for our wisdom and compassion to manifest.  We see clearly what’s happening and act skillfully in the world.  We get to see how our craving and attachment create suffering for ourselves and others and push us into the three lower realms.  

In the hungry ghost realm,  we want stuff and we’re incredibly frustrated because we never get it (greed).  In the animal realm,  we simply try to avoid pain and make ourselves comfortable—we’re just complacent and dull (ignorance).  In the hell realm, we can’t escape from our anger and hatred, and feel claustrophobic and extremely hot or cold (anger and ill will).  These three poisons and their attendent hell realms are the root souce of our suffering and the suffering we perpetuate for others.  They aren’t something that comes from somewhere else and strikes us randomly.  We put ourselves there in those realms and we can get ourselves out by taking refuge in the three treasures and doing our practice.