[51] Realization of nonappearance is a gate of Dharma illumination; for[with it] we experience the truth of cessation.
無生忍是法明門、證滅諦故。

This “realization of non-appearance” is a very old teaching.  The Sanskrit word is anutpattika-dharmaksanti, the  recognition and acceptance that nothing really arises or perishes, which is another way to say that all conditioned phenomena are empty.  In later texts we encounter this as teachings about life-and-death or birth-and-death, arising and perishing or coming and going, or appearing and disappearing.  It shows up in early texts like the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra, a huge description of stages of the Yogācāra path to Buddhahood.  According to that text, this recognition of non-appearance is realized by bodhisattvas at the eighth stage.

Nagarjuna talks about this too in his Mahaprajnaparamita Shastra.  In that text, someone asks how a bodhisattva can possibly consider all beings to be equal when they’re so obviously different.  A cow has cow-nature and a horse has horse-nature, and those two things can’t be switched.  The same is true for good people and evil people; they have good natures or evil natures and those aren’t the same.  Isn’t it a mistake for the bodhisattva to consider all of these beings the same?

The answer is: yes, that would be a mistake if indeed there was such a thing as a fixed cow-nature or evil nature,  but for the bodhisattva there is no distinction to be made between identity and difference, or difference and sameness.  Then the text offers a verse:
Non-arisen, non-destroyed, unceasing, non-eternal,
Neither identical nor different, without coming or going,
Dharmas resulting from causes escape from all vain wordiness
The Buddha is able to define them; I pay homage to him.

Conditioned things don’t arise or perish, they’re not permanent or impermanent, not different or the same and don’t come and go.  Because they’re empty, they can’t be described accurately in words, but Buddha can see and understand what’s happening there.  The point is: the conditioned things we encounter are empty of any permanent self-nature and therefore cannot come and go.  We can’t put boundaries around them and describe them because there’s no place where we can say this thing ends and another one begins.  If things are not actually separate from each other, then how can we isolate one thing and say that now just that thing is arising or perishing, as distinct from anything else?

Another early text, the Prajnaparamita Shastra, shows how the bodhisattva even accepts that his or her body is non-existent.  That’s not easy to do; we live in this body and it’s pretty hard to give up our idea that we are this body.  If the body does not arise nor cease, then where does that leave us?  It feels like annihilation.

According to this text, when we accept the non-arising of the individual, personal body, there is only the dharmakaya, the dharma body of Buddha which is the same as Nirvana.  Within the dharmakaya there are no pairs of opposites.  There can’t be one side without the other, and yet we can’t distinguish between the sides.  At what point does dark stop being dark and become light?  At what point does young stop being young and become old?  At what point does living become dying?

The gate statement talks about accepting non-arising, but it’s implying that we also accept non-perishing since these two things aren’t separate.  Accepting one part of a pair of opposites means accepting the other as well, so if we accept birth or life or arising, we also accept death.

Uchiyama Roshi says: As long as we think we were born, we will die. Grasped by thoughts, people usually think only of living and put a lid on dying in order not to see it; they don’t understand true life. When we uncover the lid and see that life includes death, we can see true life clearly. As the reality of life, we are born and die within the total, interpenetrating self that has no birth and death. This is mahā—great, boundless vastness. (1)

In Japanese Buddhism, there is the term shoji 生死, or life-and-death.  There are several kinds of life-and-death in the Buddhist tradition.  One is the process of being born, growing older, becoming sick and dying.  This kind of life-and-death is an abbreviation for what Siddhartha Gautama discovered when he left the palace four times and learned about the four kinds of suffering, or dukkha.  

There is also life-and-death seen as one long period of time between our birth and our death.  This is life-and-death seen as moment-by-moment activity: this body and mind are being born and dying (or arising and perishing) moment after moment.  

There is also the day to day life of ordinary people who are transmigrating through the six realms of samsara because they’re pulled by their karma, in contrast to the life of the bodhisattva who is being led by vow rather than pulled by karma and is living in the world of samsara in order to save beings.  In other words, bodhisattvas aren’t living life after life because of their delusion and three poisonous minds but because of their work to liberate others.

Dogen’s teaching is that life and death in samsara is the life of Buddha, not different from nirvana.  He’s talking about arising and perishing before separation into samsara and nirvana.  In Shobogenzo Zenki he says:  Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth-and-death to be avoided, there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth-and-death.

In order to understand his teaching on arising and non-arising, we have to understand his view of time.  It’s really a complex topic and I’m just going to say a few things about it here.  Something arises and seems to exist for some period of time and then perishes, but Dogen says that each thing exists in its dharma position at this moment; it has its own past and future, but each of those moments is independent.  

It isn’t that there is linear time in which a thing appears, grows, changes and disappears.  In this moment it’s in its dharma position, and there is some continuation that means that the thing functions like itself.  A dog doesn’t become a tree or something else in the next moment, but the position of puppy and adult dog and elderly dog are independent of each other.  The power of puppy is to negate puppy and become dog; that’s its function, and yet that puppy or dog is empty and has no fixed self.

It’s not so easy to understand, but this is how arising and non-arising works.  We have karmic influences that influence this moment, but this moment is new, fresh and independent.  The past is gone; we can’t take action there.  The future isn’t here yet; we can’t take action there either.  In Shobogenzo Shoji, Dogen says: It is a mistake to think that life turns into death.  Life is a position at one time with its own before and after.  Consequently, in the buddha dharma, it is said that life is itself no-arising.  Death is a position at one time with its own before and after.  Consequently, it is said that death is itself no-perishing.  In life there is nothing other than life.  In death, there is nothing other than death.  Therefore, when life comes, just life.  When death comes, just die.  Neither avoid them nor desire them.

Right there is exactly what this gate statement is talking about.  Realization of nonappearance is a gate of Dharma illumination; for[with it] we experience the truth of cessation.  According to early Buddhist teachings,  Buddha saw that the only way to the cessation of suffering was the cessation of rebirth.  In the world of desire, our craving and aversion intersect with impermanence to keep us tied to the wheel of samsara, but even if we manage to loosen those bonds and move to another of the six realms that we might like better, the very fact of our existence means can’t leave suffering behind.  This is the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: existence is characterized by suffering.

According to these teachings, arising or life brings suffering with it.  If beings don’t appear or arise, then suffering ceases.  We can see now how Dogen interpreted this.  Non-arising and cessation of suffering isn’t about leaping free of wheel of samsara and going somewhere else or not existing at all.  It’s about understanding that non-arising is the reality of our moment-by-moment life experience.  In that way, Nirvana, or cessation, is right here in midst of it all.  From a place of awakening, we see that non-arising has already been accomplished right here.  Because things are empty of a permanent self-nature, they don’t arise as independent items we can label and distinguish.  Their dharma position has a before and after, but those are all independent of each other.  Something doesn’t become something else because there is no linear stream of time; there is only this moment, the eternal now.  When we see that, we’re released from the clinging that causes our suffering.

Again in the Shushogi, Dogen says: The most important issue for all Buddhists is the thorough clarification of the meaning of birth and death.  If the buddha is within birth and death, there is no birth and death.  Simply understand that birth and death are in themselves nirvana; there is no birth and death to be hated nor nirvana to be desired.  Then, for the first time we will be freed from birth and death.  To master this problem is of supreme importance. (2)

If the buddha is within birth and death, there is no birth and death.  In other words, if we’re seeing with buddha’s eyes, with the eyes of awakening, there is no arising and perishing.  Clearly, Dogen considers this a very important point if he says The most important issue for all Buddhists is the thorough clarification of the meaning of birth and death. He’s not just saying we need to understand our individual life stories.  We need to awaken to the non-appearance and non-perishing of everything in the universe.  We need to deeply understand how this works or we’ll never be free from suffering.

Dogen wrote a lot about this because it’s such a central teaching, particularly in his Genjokoan, the first fascicle of the 75-fascicle version of the Shobogenzo.  Okumura Roshi says that the main theme of the Mahayana tradition is seeing one reality from two sides, and that the main theme of Dogen’s Genjokoan is how to live and practice based on clearly understanding one-reality-two-sides.  Okumura Roshi explains that in the word genjo 現成, gen 現 means to appear, show up or be in the present moment, but it also has the feeling of something that was hidden and then becomes visible, a manifestation of something potential into something actual.  However, the larger view is that nothing is actually hidden and nothing really appears; this is the non-appearance of the gate statement.  Jo 成 is to complete or accomplish, so genjo is to manifest, actualize, appear or become.

Okumura Roshi says the term koan 公按 in this case is pointing to the intersection of difference and sameness, so this is all about two sides of one reality, seeing what appears or manifests in the intersection of unity and diversity, and seeing how things like arising and perishing and life and death are and are not opposites.

Nishiari Bokusan was a Dogen scholar in the late 1800s.  He says:  The gen spoken of here is not the gen that is related to hiding or appearing, remaining or perishing.  There is neither hiding nor appearing in the true genjo.  When we say that a hidden thing appears, it usually refers to the appearance that is relative to hiding.  In this dualistic sense, it is the phenomenon of birth and death.  But actually, in the realm of the true genjo, there is no hiding.  Thus there is no appearing. . . . What can be merely hidden or revealed is not the true genjo.  When we say there is no hiding or appearing, it means that there is no arising or perishing, no increasing or decreasing.  The dharma realm of heaven and earth as it is extends from the Kashyapa  Buddha in the past to Maitreya Buddha in the future, unceasingly through the past, present and future, regardless of the creation or destruction of the world. (3)  

Dogen starts the Genjokoan by setting up three important sets of opposites in our practice and tradition:
(1) delusion and enlightenment, 
(2) buddhas and living beings, and 
(3) life and death, or arising and perishing

First he says, There is delusion and realization, practice, life and death, buddhas and living beings.  Then he says, There is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no living beings, no birth and no perishing.  Then he says, There is arising and perishing, delusion and realization, living beings and buddhas.  

First we perceive our lives in the usual way: beings are born, things are created, they have some lifespan and then they die or break or become obsolete.  Then when we practice, we see that actually there is nothing we can distinguish as an independent being or thing that’s coming into existence and going out of existence.  Finally, we understand that reality is in the intersection of these two points of view, and that the actual appearing and disappearing is within non-appearing and non-disappearing.

Just like the Genjokoan, the gate statement is about understanding two sides of one reality and practicing with that understanding.  There is our own birth and death.  There is our experience of things coming into our lives and going out of our lives.  That’s real, and also there is nothing we can distinguish as arising and perishing and coming and going, so we are living and dying in midst of non-arising and non-perishing.

I think Dogen understood that even though this teaching is one of the most imporant in our tradition, it’s really difficult for us to understand.  He talked about it over and over and in various different ways using various different examples, and it keeps coming back to interconnectedness and impermanence.  In the Bendowa, he explains that interconnectedness and impermanence are precisely why there’s no soul or atman.  He says if we accept that all things are impermanent, how can we think there’s a permanent soul that goes on somewhere else after the body dies and never perishes?  If we accept interconnectedness, how can we separate the mind from the body?  Yes, body and mind exist in this moment, but they don’t arise or cease, and certainly not as separate from each other.  He says clinging to an idea about a permanent soul or spirit doesn’t free you from life and death; that kind of clinging is the cause of life and death.  (4)

There are a number of other examples in the Eihei Koroku where Dogen talks about arising or non-arising.  In one place, he says:
This very body and mind are not merely the five skandhas.  Our wondrous existence is most excellent, and should not be an object of desire.  Without coming or going, we simply respond to sounds and colors.  Further, we turn around from our center, and move out in the eight directions.  Negating all dualities, our feet are on the ground.  How could there be arising and perishing as our magnanimous energy pierces the heavens?  Although it is like this, do not say that killing Buddha after all has no results.  The genuine cause of attaining buddhahood is zazen. (5)
​
This very body and mind are not merely the five skandhas.  Our wondrous existence is most excellent, and should not be an object of desire.
This very body and mind are body and mind as complete manifestations of reality, beyond our limited view.  We shouldn’t be clinging to life as just something that belongs to the small self or something we own for our own purposes.

Without coming or going, we simply respond to sounds and colors.
In the world of non-arising and non-perishing, we carry out our function in our dharma position.  We do that with this body and mind, including the sense organs that take in sounds and colors, but without getting stuck or being pulled around by our karma.

Further, we turn around from our center, and move out in the eight directions.  
We see and act from broader perspective than just this body and mind.

Negating all dualities, our feet are on the ground.  How could there be arising and perishing as our magnanimous energy pierces the heavens?  
Even though we have a body and mind that functions in this world of samsara and life and death, we also see beyond opposites.  In that way we also live and die in Nirvana as bodhisattvas and we can work to liberate all beings.

Although it is like this, do not say that killing Buddha after all has no results.  The genuine cause of attaining buddhahood is zazen.  
Killing Buddha means going beyond our stories and limited ideas about awakening and being in the middle of real awakening itself.  That’s what we do in zazen.  Even though awakening is already here, even though we’re already beyond arising and perishing and non-arising and non-perishing, we practice in order to manifest it in the world.  As Dogen frequently reminds us, practice and awakening are not two, just like so many dualities that get both negated and upheld in this practice.

Notes

(1) Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary. (2018). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 57
​(2)  Engaging Dogen's Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening. (2016). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 69-70.​
(3) Dogen, E., Zenji, E. D. (2011). Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries. United States: Counterpoint Press, p. 13.
​(4) Uchiyama, Kosho. (1997). The wholehearted way : a translation of Eihei Dōgen's Bendōwa with commentary. Boston, Mass. : Tuttle Publishing, p. 32-33.
(5) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications. p. 271
​

The sense organs are a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with them]we practice the right way.
入是法明門、修正道故。

The kanji here for the sense organs are a Buddhist expression.  It’s not the everyday term for normal five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch; this gate statement uses 入, a word for entry or entrance, to indicate sense organ.  We also find it in 六入 roku nyu, six entries; usually we say six sense gates.

Why six senses rather than the five we usually expect?  In Buddhism, mind is a sense-organ, which we’ll consider shortly.  There are other similar Buddhist terms for the sense organs.  Sometimes it’s six roots 根 or six places 処, but today we have the gateways of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind.  These are called gates because stimulation comes in from outside—and we express our thoughts and emotions back to the outside.

In the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha tells us that the origin of suffering is craving, and in the twelvefold chain of dependent origination, craving arises from sensations.  Sensations result from the six sense organs being in contact with objects.  The eye sees something, the skin touches something, and sensation arises which is either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  When we think of mind as a sense organ, the objects of mind are memories, images, concepts or things we can think about.  Then we start writing a story and running after some things and running away from other things.

These eighteen elements—sense organs, the things they contact, and the sensation that arises—are the foundations for the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance.  Now we can see the entire process: the sense organ comes in contact with an object, a sensation arises, the three poisons arise, craving starts, and we have suffering.  Buddha said that to overcome craving and the suffering that results, we need wisdom.  We need to develop some insight into how the senses work and then exercise some care about how we use them.

In the first talk he gave after his awakening, the Buddha said:
Bhikkhus, these two extremes ought not to be cultivated by one gone forth from the house-life. What are the two? There is devotion to indulgence of pleasure in the objects of sensual desire, which is inferior, low, vulgar, ignoble, and leads to no good; and there is devotion to self-torment, which is painful, ignoble and leads to no good. 

This gate is taking us back to some of the most basic and important teachings in our tradition.  For example, we don’t indulge our greed by grabbing all the chocolate cake or gourmet pink lettuce, but we also don’t ignore the needs of the body by not eating properly.  The middle way is to take care of the body with reasonable, nutritious, appealing food without being caught up in the senses and going to extremes.

In fact, sensory desire is one of the five hindrances.  If we’re looking for happiness or comfort through gratifying the senses and clinging to the thoughts and ideas related to that, it’s hard to maintain focus or settle down while we’re always being pulled around by the senses.  We don’t have to ignore or suppress what our sense are doing, but we do need to pay attention to what’s happening—and what’s happening is that we’re creating suffering.  The enjoyment we get from gratifying the senses ultimately becomes suffering when those sensations go away.

There are several other important themes about the sense gates that show up throughout our tradition.  One is that the world we create using sense-data is an illusion.  Another is that sense gates and everything that goes with them both exist and don’t exist; these are teachings related to emptness.  A third is that although the sense gates lead to the three poisons and suffering, they are also instances of prajna or wisdom.

First let’s talk about the illusory world of the senses.  We’d like to think that when our senses come in contact with something, we get a pure and complete picture of that object.  Especially if it’s a neutral object and we don’t have any strong feelings about it, we think we perceive the reality of it.  However, it’s not possible for a couple of reasons.  One is that the human body is limited.  We can’t see all sides of an object at the same time.  We can’t see some colors of light or some frequencies of sound.  Okumura Roshi sometimes makes the point that humans can’t hear everything dogs can hear, so what seems quiet for us might be very noisy for dogs.

Another problem is that we immediately filter all of our sense data through our previous knowledge and experiences so we can categorize it.  That seems to be chocolate cake, which I know I like, or that seems to be a bat, and I had a bad experience once with a bat in my house, so I’m not so keen.  Our perception of something is our own perception; it’s not like someone else’s, and not like it might be in our own past or future.

Uchiyama Roshi says:  We assume that we are all living together in one commonly shared world.  However, this is not true from the perspective of the reality of our life-experience, which we learn about through letting go of our thought in zazen.  For example, when you and I look at a cup, we usually assume that we are looking at the very same cup, but this isn’t so in terms of true raw life-experience,  I am looking from my angle and with the power of my vision and you are looking from your angle and with your power of vision.  There is absolutely no way we can exchange nor understand each other’s experience.\

This is not only true for seeing; it is true of every perception and sense experience--hearing smelling, tasting and touching.  The world in which we actually live and experience life in its vivid freshness is a world that is mine alone and yours alone. (1)

It’s kind of interesting to consider that each of us is creating our own world moment by moment out of the things coming in through our sense gates.  My experience and your experience can never be exactly the same, and my experience and the true reality of all beings can never be exactly the same.  We have to use our senses to navigate the world, but we also have to see the illusion.  We can be fooled and we can make mistakes

There’s another issue with thinking that our perceptions are completely clear: the senses don’t work separately.  We don’t see something or hear something in isolation from the rest of the body’s functioning, and that influences how we experience these sensations.  Also, all the senses interact with each other and work together.

Okumura Roshi says: Usually we think we see things in the same way that a mirror reflects an image of an object.  We think the object is reflected in our eyes and that our eyes see the object.  Yet “seeing color and hearing sounds with body and mind” means that our lives and our bodies do not function in such a disjointed way.  It is really true that we see things not only with our eyes and year things not only with our ears.  The whole body and mind are involved in the activities of seeing objects, hearing sounds, smelling fragrances, tasting flavors and feeling sensations.

When having a meal, for example, all our senses are engaged.  We see the food’s color and shape with the eyes, smell and taste the food, and even hear the sound of our biting and chewing.  When we swallow, we experience satisfaction in feeling the food move down the throat until it settles in the stomach.  We may think of how delicious the food is and experience gratitude for those who prepared the meal, and we may think appreciatively of the immeasurable work that was involved in growing, harvesting and transporting the food.  These experiences of the meal are not simply discrete products of individual sense organs and their separate objects; we experience a meal engaging the entire body and mind. (2)  

We’ve got all of these sensations coming at us through the sense gates all the time, and we don’t usually stop to sort out what’s going on.  We just experience with the whole body and mind and plunge fully into this moment—and no wonder it’s so easy to cling to a sense of a fixed self and assume we have an independant separate self-nature.  When we look in the mirror, we see our unique faces with all the sense organs, and of course all that exists; no one would argue that point.  Then along comes the Heart Sutra, which says there is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind, and also no objects of those senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of mind), and also no sense-consciousnesses that arise when each sense organ makes contact with an object.  Yet we’ve just considered that these eighteen elements are the basis for the three poisons and all our craving and suffering.  What’s going on?

The teaching here is that these things have no independent, permanent existence: in other words, they’re empty.  We can identify physical sense organs, our sensations are real, and the objects we experience are real, but these don’t form the entirety of reality.  They’re partial, they’re influenced and distorted, and they change all the time.  

Not only that, who is it that thinks he or she owns these sense organs and the impressions that come from them?  We can really see five skandhas clinging to five skandhas here and now unreliable that dynamic is.  There’s a collection of aggregates called “I” that’s collecting distorted sense data, mixing it with various thoughts and memories and writing a story about the nature of reality.   Hmmmmm.  There are so many ways to go off the rails here.

We need to develop the wisdom to see what’s really going on so we can be skillful in these conditions.  Okumura Roshi has this to say:
Our picture of the world is our reality, but we should understand that it is distorted.  This is the meaning of emptiness.  Our mind is emptiness.  Our sense organs are emptiness.  Things outside us are also emptiness.  Everything is just an illusion.  The fact that we live with illusion is our reality.  When we really understand this and see how illusion is caused, we can see reality through the illusion.  Whatever we see, whatever we grasp with our sense organs and consciousness is illuson.  When we see this we are released from attachment to our limited view, to what we have , to what we think we own.  We may not become completely free, but we become less restricted by our limitations. (3) 

Again, we’re not saying that our senses and sensations aren’t real; they just don’t have existence that’s separate from anything else, and because they’re connected to each other and influenced by other elements around them, they can’t tell us the whole story.  

There are a couple of parts of the Sandokai that can provide some helpful illustrations.  The Sandokai is a poem written by Shitou Xichian in 8th century China.  In English the title is The Merging of Difference and Sameness, and in Japan we chant this poem every other day during morning service.  Sandokai is a poem about holding both individuality and distinctions and also the larger view of nonduality.  In a couple of places, it makes reference to the individual sense gates as real and functioning and yet also as not really independent or separate from each other or their objects or the entire network.

At one point it says, “Each sense and every field interact and yet do not.”  Each sense organ makes contact with objects and sensation arises, but also this never happens, because the sense organ and the object are not separate.  I have ears and I can hear music, and out of that a pleasant sensation arises, but also, there is no separate “I” with something to be distinguished as ears that are distinct from music, and no pleasant sensation that’s separate from the complete functioning of this moment.

Okumura Roshi says: [The sense organs of the body and mind and their objects] are independent and yet work together to create the world.  When we sit in this space, the space and my sitting become one.  When I cook in the kitchen, this body, my self, the ingredients the water, the fire, the untensils, and the space called the kitchen become one being working together.  When we play baseball, the whole universe becomes the world of playing baseball,  Our activity and the universe become one,  It all works together.  If we become angry, this whole world becomes the world of anger.  Everything around us makes us crazy and angry.  When we have a competitive mind, this entire world becomes the world of competition,  Our body and mind work together with the environment to create one world,  In this sense our mind is very important.  A change in our mind could change the whole world.  Our practice is important because it is not just the practice of our mind; it influences the whole universe. (4)  

If I’m working in my shop, seeing and smelling the wood, hearing the lathe going around and the chisel cutting shavings, and feeling the tools in my hand, I can identify each of these things as distinct from each other.  However, I can also see that they’re not separate from the entirety of the scene of what’s going on in the shop, and nowhere is there a separate me.  Early Buddhists said this is why there’s no permanent essence, atman or soul outside of the relationship between sense organs and objects; our lives consist only of these 18 elements.  Then the Heart Sutra came along to say even these things don’t exist as we usually think of them.  Finally, Dogen said they exist but are actually empty (impermanent and with no independent existence), and because of that, the sense gates are actually instances of wisdom or prajna.

That seems puzzling because we’ve just been hearing about how we can be led astray by the illusions of the sense organs and what arises from them.  How do we become able to see the senses as prajna, and how does all this relate to our practice of zazen?

Clearly, this isn’t a practice of the intellect, because even though we know some things about physiology, there’s still plenty we don’t know about what the brain does with the stuff that comes in through the sense gates, and how five skandhas cling to five skandhas and create a self out of that attachment.

Uchiyama Roshi says, Who is seeing?  How can we see?  It’s truly a mystery!  Scientists may explain the function of retinal cells, optic nerves and so forth, but no matter how much explanation is given, we cannot understand the most crucial point.  Eyes are eyes, and things are things, but how does the consciousness of seeing arise?  This is really mysterious and beyond our comprehensive thought.  The root of this wondrous phenomenon can only be called “life.”   Even if we put all the various parts of the human body together, such as head, chest of legs, and connect them, we still cannot create a human being.  Only if life functions there is there a human being.  The ground of such wondrous life is rooted in is prajna paramita.  

Dogen’s advice is that to hear the teaching of Buddha through everything we encounter every day.  In other words, to perceive objects clearly through prajna we have to free our sense gates from defilement by the three poisons.

Okumura Roshi says:  Even though we see things we don’t normally see them as the Dharma.  How can we get this true Dharma eye?  How can we really see the Dharma?  That is the point of our practice.  In the Soto Zen tradition we do monastic practice to transform our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind.  The foundation of monastic practice is zazen, and all the activities in daily monastic life are the manifestation of zazen practice: chanting sutras, listening to Dharma talks, eating with oryoki, cooking, cleaning, even resting and sleeping.  Doing all these activities with awakening mind, being mindful and attentive--this is the way we transform our six sense organs into the true Dharma eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. (5)  

He goes on to say that most of us in the West don’t live in a training temple, and we need to find some other way to live with this same spirit.  We have to find other ways to experience what Dogen describes: seeing clearly and knowing that there is no separation between senses and their objects.  Of course, we can do this through all the activities of our practice lives: zazen, work, study and ritual.  We don’t have to be in a special temple or take on some particular status as practitioners.  As long as we’re taking in stimulation through the sense gates and working with it skillfully, we’re doing that practice.

When it comes to our zazen, of course our bodies and minds are fully functioning while we’re sitting.  We’re not turning anything off or suppressing anything that’s happening.  That means our senses are working: we’re smelling the incense, hearing the bell, feeling our cushions under us, and because we’re human we’re taking all those sensations in and creating a world.  Uchiyama Roshi called the appearance of the world as we perceive it through our senses the scenery of our zazen.  We’re aware of that scenery, but we’re not clinging to it or resting in it.  It’s coming and going like the clouds in the sky, and we’re not making anything out of it.

Okumura Roshi did a translation of Keizan Zenji’s Zazen Yojinki, covering things we should be careful about regarding zazen.  Keizan describes how we let go of everything during zazen and drop off body and mind:
Zazen is far beyond the form  of sitting or lying down. Free from considerations of good and evil, zazen transcends distinctions between ordinary people and sages, it goes far eyond judgements of deluded or enlightened. Zazen includes no boundary between sentient beings and buddha. Therefore put aside all affairs, and let go of all associations. Do nothing at all. The six senses produce nothing.

Another translation says “The six sense are inactive.”  In other words, we’re not fabricating stuff out of what’s coming in through the sense gates.  We’re making no distinctions between one thing and another because we’re letting go of thought and simply letting the universe function through us.

There’s another famous image for this: the stone woman and the wooden man.  These two come from the Hokyo Zammai or Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi, a 9th century Chinese poem by Dongshan Liangjie.  This is another one we chant every other morning in Japan.  The line says: the wooden man starts to sing; the stone woman gets up dancing.  In the context of the poem, these are two insentient beings preaching the dharma, which can only be understood by buddhas because the stone woman would be dancing without movement and the wooden man would be singing without sound.  It’s also making the point that in the broad view there is no distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings.  These two beings are simply and completely carrying out their function as wood and stone with nothing extra, just as the bodhisattva simply and completely carries out his or her vows with nothing extra.  Again, the universe functions through all of these beings.

Dogen, as is his way, picks up on this image and gives it a different context.  He gave a dharma hall discourse in which he said:
For nine years Bodhidharma bestowed a single utterance. Until now, people in various regions have mistakenly taken it up. Do you want to demonstrate it without mistakes? Eihei will again demonstrate it for the sake of all of you. The Iron Ring mountains surround Mount Sumeru at the center.  This is just exactly right. Thus it is demonstrated completely. However, is it possible to demonstrate it unmistakably? After a pause Dogen said: The jade woman recalls her dream of the triple world. The wooden man sits, cutting off functioning of the six senses.  Dogen descended from his seat. (6)
​ 
What does all this mean?  For nine years Bodhidharma bestowed a single utterance.  Tradition says that Bodhidharma sat zazen for nine years in a cave without saying anything.  Dogen says he communicated only one thing: thusness.  Until now, people in various regions have mistakenly taken it up.  No one has really understood what Bodhidharma was doing.  Do you want to demonstrate it without mistakes? Eihei will again demonstrate it for the sake of all of you.  Dogen’s going to show us how it’s done.  The Iron Ring mountains surround Mount Sumeru at the center.  This is just exactly right. Thus it is demonstrated completely.  This is a description of mountains in Indian Buddhist cosmology.  Dogen is just describing reality as it is.  However, is it possible to demonstrate it unmistakably? After a pause Dogen said: The jade woman recalls her dream of the triple world. The wooden man sits, cutting off functioning of the six senses.  Dogen descended from his seat.  The jade woman or stone woman is right in the midst of thusness or nirvana or awakening and is also right in the middle of the illusory world of samsara.  The wooden man is sitting zazen right in the middle of thusness or awakening, completely alive and functioning and doing exactly what Keizan described later in the Zazen Yojinki: not fabricating anything out of the sense gates.

We live in the world of the senses and we also go beyond the world of the senses.  The sense gates are an opportunity to study and investigate the world and our own moment-by-moment experience.  The challenge is not to get caught by our senses and lose sight of what we’re doing.

Notes

1) ​Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 128.
​2) Okumura, S. (2010). Realizing Genjokoan: The Key to Dogen's Shobogenzo. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 67.
​3) Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 133
​4) Ibid., p. 235.
5) Okumura, S. (2018). The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioner's Guide to Dogen's "Sansuikyo". United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 13.
6) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 206.

[48] Hidden expedient means are a gate of Dharma illumination; for they are sensitive to many kinds of suffering.
色受想行識の五蘊の方便説を明らかにすることは法明門である。それによってすべての苦を知ることが出来るからである。

The kanji for this gate refer to the expedient means of the four great elements becoming the five skandhas of body and mind, ensuring we’re prepared to be aware of the entirety of suffering.  The five skandhas are the components that come together to make up a sentient being.  Back at Gate 45 we saw that the four elements are earth, air, fire and water, and that these make up form, or the body, the first of the five skandhas, as well as the other four skandhas which are are functions of the mind.  Feeling is getting sense information from the body, perception is creating mental images and concepts out of that sense information, formation is the will that acts on those images and ideas. our motivation for action, and consciousness does the discernment and integrates the feeling, perception and formation.

The coming together of the five skandhas results in a perception of a fixed and permanent self-nature.  It’s an illusion, but immediately there is clinging and constructing a story about self.  First we cling to the body and decide that “this is me;” then we take the feelings coming from our sense-organs and layer that on top.  We decide we have to take some actions in order to gratify the body and the senses, getting stuff we want and running away from stuff we don’t want.  This is where we get swept away by the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance, and where we create karma with body, speech and mind.  Consciousness pulls all this together and creates a complex and subtle picture of this thing we call self.

In the Buddhist tradition there are four layers of consciousness.  On the surface there is mind consciousness; this is our day to day thinking, planning, worrying mind.  The next level down is sense consciousness: the physical senses come in contact with a sense-object and we have some experience of that contact.  Next is the storehouse consciousness, or alaya.  It stores and processes all kinds of information, seeds and experiences.  It’s changing all the time, both because it’s always taking in information and because it’s processing and transforming that material.  You see something or taste something, have an experience of that, and it goes into the storehouse consciousness.

Storehouse consciousness operates at a deeper level than mind consciousness.  It can drive actions by itself without the mind consciousness.  You get cold in the night and pull up the blanket without really waking up.  You need to choose between the birthday card with the puppy wearing glasses or the one with the sailboat scene and you’re drawn to one or the other,  You’re walking along minding your own business and suddenly you see something fall over in front of you and you jump out of the way.  

Storehouse consciousness is very impressionable.  It’s not mind consciousness that’s deciding what should get stored; there are all kinds of impressions in there, including what we pick up from other people, our culture, or our surroundings, and here’s where group stupidity can start to take hold.  Out of the awareness of mind consciousness, decisions are being made.  It’s the storehouse consciousness rather than the mind consciousness that decides that it’s a separate self.  It’s not the day to day, thinking, worrying mind that’s writing that story at its most basic level.

Finally there’s the manas consciousness.  Its entire function is to cling to the storehouse consciousness as a separate self.  The ignorance and fear present in the storehouse consciousness gives rise to manas, and manas turns around and clings to the storehouse and never lets go.  Storehouse and manas never turn off.  Mind consciousness stops when you go to sleep or fall into a coma, but these other two are always functioning as long as you’re alive.

The gate statement says that these teachings about the five skandhas are an expedient means, and that when that’s clear, we are able to recognize many kinds of suffering.  Something that moves ourselves and others toward awakening is what we call skillful or expedient means.  The inference is that whatever it is doesn’t have to be literally true as long as it serves the purpose.  We see various instances in the Pali Canon and the Lotus Sutra of the Buddha giving different teachings to different people depending on their circumstances and what they were ready to take in.

When we’re in the grip of the manas consciousness clinging to the idea of self, we need to hear about the five skandhas.  It’s the only way we’re going to understand that our suffering comes from wanting things to be different for this illusory self.  Until you encountered Buddha’s teaching, chances are you didn’t understand how suffering is created and perpetuated.  We’re not born with knowledge about the four noble truths and the five skandhas and the four layers of consciousness.  We just think there’s a “me” that needs things, because we have no reason not to think that.  Then one day we meet the Buddha and we start to see how the parts come together and create some energy that holds them together.  We see that there’s a way to break the grip of our delusion and suffering.  Hooray!  Bodhicitta!

Now we’re bodhisatvas practicing in the world, and we encounter the Heart Sutra that says there are no five skandhas.  Suddenly we understand that the give skandhas were an expedient means.  The point of the teachings about five skandhas is to show us that there is no self.

But if there aren’t really five skandhas, why would Buddha teach that there are?  The Lotus Sutra explains about expedient means in several places.  In the second chapter, Buddha explains that the reason Buddhas appear in the world is to help move everyone toward the same awakening as themselves.  However, not everyone has the capacity to take in and understand the teachings, so Buddhas devise skillful or expedient means to lead people on.  Later on in the 25th chapter (Universal Gateway) the Buddha explains that Avalokitesvara takes any bodily form necessary in the moment to save beings.  He becomes a layperson, an elder, a minister of state, somebody’s wife, a young person, or whatever is needed.  In the standard Sotoshu morning service, we chant this chapter, known as the Fumonbonge, every day—it’s that important in our tradition.

For Avalokitesvara, the five skandas can take on any number of forms as expedient means to allow him to see and help all kinds of suffering beings.  The skandhas don’t make up a fixed self; they and the teachings about them are an expedient means.  We can use these teachings to start letting go of our own clinging to self, and at some point we also let go of clinging to the teachings about the five skandas.  We see that ultimately they’re empty.  There’s an analogy that says that the average person’s view is like the sky obscured by clouds.  The bodhisattva’s view doesn’t have the clouds but just a little haze.  Buddha’s view is completely clear and he sees even the subtle haze that even the bodhisattva doesn’t see.  The Heart Sutra says that the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara aroused his original wisdom and saw that the five skandhas are empty.  In that moment, he was released from suffering, and not just some of it, but ALL suffering and distress, even the subtle, tricky stuff.  

Buddha’s method is that expedient means exist only for those who need them.  When the need is gone, they should disappear like imaginary jewels or perhaps, as the gate statement says, they become hidden expedient means.

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).  It’s Sawaki Roshi’s “zazen is good for nothing,” Uchiyama Roshi’s “opening the hand of thought,” and Okumura Roshi’s “1=0=∞ (infinity).”  Getting clear on this puts us in the same position as Avalokitesvata in the sutra.  Now we’re bodhisattvas able to help move other beings toward awakening.  Avalokitesvara goes on to explain his understanding to Shariputra.  What is that but expedient means, until Shariputra can see it all for himself?  Then he can let go of the teachings about five skandhas too.

Prajna is understanding expedient means and also understanding emptiness.  On that basis, compassion for others arises, but we need this human form made up of five skandhas to carry that out.  Sometimes this is called the two-fold expediency of the bodhisattva.  He doesn’t fall into attachment to things because of wisdom, and he also doesn’t abandon people because of compassion.  He’s interested in helping, but he doesn’t lose sight of impermanence, interconnectedness and the illusory nature of self.  In other words, the bodhisattva sees the emptiness of five skandas so he’s free from clinging and attachment, but he still sees the suffering of beings made up of five skandas, has compassion for them, and carries out his vow to liberate them.  

He couldn’t do this without the five skandas that make up his form, so he doesn’t give them up completely and disappear; he makes use of them as expedient means, stays in this samsaric world, arouses compassion and works to save others.  Because he also has the form of these five skandhas, he can see and understand all the myriad forms of unease that go with that.  Thus the gate statement says that clearly understanding the expedient means of the five skandhas means the bodhisattva is prepared to see or be sensitive to all kinds of suffering.

In order to see suffering, one has to use one’s eyes, which are dependent on the form of the five skandhas.  According to the Diamond Sutra, there are  five kinds of Buddha eyes:
1) physical eye: that we all commonly see with in this human form
2) heavenly eye: the broader perspective that comes with zazen
3) wisdom eye: seeing emptiness
4) dharma eye: seeing that form and emptiness are both real and doesn’t cling to either one; this is the eye of the bodhisattva
5) Buddha eye: eye and Buddha and the universe it sees are not separate; all-pervading sight/vision that can’t really be described

The bodhisattva uses the dharma eye to see that the five skandhas are empty but are also real.  That’s how he can use his karmic conditions to carry out his vows without getting stuck anywhere.  In a way, the bodhisattva is himself an expedient means.  The Buddha died and crossed over to Nirvana; he’s no longer in this world working concretely to save beings.  That falls to the bodhisattva, who doesn’t use Buddha eye, doesn’t give up the five skandhas, and doesn’t disappear from this world.

In Opening the Hand of Thought, Uchiyama quotes the Shodoka, a Chinese poem:
The five skandhas are just floating clouds that aimlessly come and go, while the three poisons are but bubbles that appear and vanish. When reality is seen, neither subject nor object exists. And in a moment the avici karma [evil fate] is eradicated

Avici is the lowest of all the hell realms.  It’s supposed to be a cube  240-thousand to 300-thousand kilometers on a side and somehow buried underground.  Suffering there is constant, with no periods or reprieve or respite.  This is where you go when you die having committed the worst possible kinds of misdeeds, like killing a parent, killing an arhat, shedding the blood of a Buddha, slandering the Lotus sutra or causing a schism in the sangha.

Avici hell is not a place you want to go, because you’ll be there for 3.4 quintillion years working off your bad karma.  However, that means that being in avici hell is not permanent.  Eventually, you can be released.  When reality is seen, neither subject nor object exists. And in a moment the avici karma is eradicated.  When we completely understand the five skandhas, we’re released from creating the evil karma that will land us in avici hell.  

Uchiyama Roshi goes on to make some comments:  Truly, all thoughts, delusions, and cravings are like bubbles and are nothing but empty comings and goings that have no substance when we wake up to zazen. Even a hell like avici, developed by our own thoughts and fantasies, becomes eradicated in an instant. Zazen enables us to experience this as reality. 

I think there’s some parallel between what the bodhisattva is doing with the five skandas and what we’re doing with thoughts in zazen.  The bodhisattva doesn’t give up embodying the five skandas and we don’t stop thinking in zazen.  No one is even trying to do these things.  No one is aiming for some perfect, immaculate state.  Instead, we’re making use of our karmic conditions.  

In both cases, there is clear insight into what’s happening that allows for not getting stuck.  The bodhisattva sees the emptiness of the five skandas but doesn’t reject them; in zazen, we see that our thoughts are just our thoughts, but we don’t try to turn them off.  The bodhisattva doesn’t get hijacked by the experience of being made up of five skandas, and in zazen we don’t create karma, suffering and hell realms based on our thoughts.  We just let them go by.  We all get to experience the emptiness of the five skandhas in a very direct way

Okumura Roshi gets the last word here:
When we study Mahayana Buddhism we learn that our body is just a collection of five skandhas and that it is empty and does not really exist. Still, when we injure even a tiny part of it like our toe, we have terrible pain. If the body is empty, where does the pain come from?  . . . No individual, independent, fixed entity is there. Still we have pain and the pain is so real, fresh and immediate that we need to take care of it somehow. Each pain comes from emptiness but each pain has its own causes and conditions. We need to figure out what is the cause of each particular pain and how to take care of it. Just seeing the emptiness or oneness of all beings does not work. [Within this one unified reality], there are many different kinds of pain that people suffer. Each pain has different cause and needs a different cure. We need to study each pain one by one.

This gate statement is giving us our challenge as bodhisattvas:
- how do we understand the five skandas as both the ground of our life and practice of liberating all beings?
- how does our understanding prepare us to study each pain one by one?
- how do we see the five skandas as an expedient means for seeing and working with emptiness?

[47] The mind without enmity and intimacy is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it], when among enemies and intimates, we are impartial.
怨みも親しみも無い心は法明門である。それによって怨みや親しみの中に平等が生まれるからである。

This is a pretty straightforward gate statement for once.  We immediately think about picking and choosing, chasing after and running away, and all the things that go with discriminative thinking.  Intimacy is something that comes up frequently in dharma teachings, and the term used here for “impartial” has some particular context within Japanese Buddhism, so we need to investigate those.

Enmity is harboring resentment, holding a grudge or bearing malice.  This is ill-will, the desire to do harm to others.  Intimacy, on the other hand, in the usual sense is about affection, familiarity and closeness.  There’s a feeling of trust that the person or form you’re encountering isn’t a threat to you and doesn’t wish you harm.  In the kanji, there’s also a connotation of parental mind.  

This is a slightly different way of considering likes and dislikes, isn’t it?  It’s not just about “I like yellow better than purple” or “I drink tea because I don’t like coffee.”  We think of our enemies and intimates as people, but really this gate is talking about anything we encounter.  We feel intimate and comfortable with the things we like and suspicious and uncomfortable with things we don’t.  However, intimacy in Zen is also about non-separation.  Being intimate with things is seeing interconnectedness and the whole story of this moment, not just the parts we like or the aspects we’re predisposed to see.  If you’re really intimate with this moment or with an object, you accept it in its entirety.

Let’s start with the individual-self version of intimacy and then look at the universal-self version.  We all have friends and family with whom we feel intimate.  We know things about them and they know things about us.  We accept each other warts and all, and we feel like we can be our authentic selves without trying to be somebody else.  We say things like “so-and-so is my other half,” or “so-and-so is my soulmate,” or that our children feel like extensions of ourselves.  We recognize what we share, and even in those areas where we differ, we appreciate the other person’s interest or skills in that area.  

It might feel like we’re complementary.  I have a dharma sister who is great at tangible detailed activities: packing boxes or suitcases, and navigating without getting lost.  I’m hopeless at that stuff.  My contribution is making a plan or doing creative problem solving.  In that way, we’re complementary even though we’re very different.  Diverse elements can function together as a whole without being identical.  If I’m carrying the idea that we can’t be friends because our karmic conditions are different, I’m ignoring intimacy.

An important part of intimacy is being willing to get go of our preconceptions about what we’re encountering; otherwise those ideas create a barrier.  We have to be willing to directly experience whatever it is without the buffer or mediation of our ideas.  That can be scary, and that’s why faith and trust are important.

I just made the point above that one aspect of intimacy is the trust that this person or object is not a threat or out to cause us harm.  When a feeling of mistrust comes up, we can take a moment to discern what actually feels threatened.  If the mountain lion is about to spring down from the boulder and land on you, then the threat is clear and we need to run away as fast as possible.  If what’s threatened is the ego, it might be possible to see that it isn’t a life and death situation.  Maybe defense and retribution aren’t necessary.  Maybe defensiveness prevents us from seeing clearly the entirety of the moment and being intimate with what’s really happening.

I also mentioned that intimacy has an element of parental mind.  This is one of the three minds or sanshin 三心 for which our temple is named: joyful mind or kishin 喜心, nurturing or parental mind or roshin 老心, and magnanimous mind or daishin 大心.  Dogen talked about these in the Tenzo Kyokun.

Nurturing mind, literally “old mind,” is like the attitude of a kindly grandmother or parent who truly enjoys caring for others. It’s the spirit of the bodhisattva.  If you’re focused on caring for someone else, you can’t maintain a barrier between you.  You put aside small self and look carefully at the other person.  The same thing happens in the way we care for tools or belongings.  In the training temple, we’re taught to carry everything with two hands, not to just wave things around casually.  If you’re carrying a teapot or pouring with it, if you’re opening a sliding door, use two hands.  Partly this is a Japanese cultural expectation -- you give and accept a business card with two hands -- but it’s also a great practice of nurturing mind.  You must be intimate with things and with what’s happening.  Dogen says when you’re the cook you should handle each grain of rice as if handling your own eyeballs.  This is an important manifestation of understanding.  Handle everything as it if was you yourself -- because it is!

Of course, it’s possible to take care of someone else or your belongings and remain completely inside your own story.  You might offer your friend what you yourself would want, or what you have, rather than what that person really needs.  You might think about your own self-image (I’m a martyr, I’m a hero,  I’m a superior practitioner) but there’s no real intimacy there.

The other trap we can fall into is thinking that compassion is an emotion and that only people we like deserve our compassion.  We can generate compassion for the family and friends with whom we’re intimate, but not for people we don’t know or don’t like very much.  Yet there’s no one outside of our compassion as bodhisattvas because compassion is based on our understanding of interconnectedness.  Intimacy is already there even though we put up barriers and choose to ignore it.

One of the people we’re most afraid of being intimate with, by the way, is ourselves.  It’s difficult to see and accept our own delusion and unskillfulness and to forgive ourselves for our misakes.  We need compassion just as much as anyone else.  In our zazen we become more intimate with ourselves, both the individual self and the universal self.  In Living and Dying in Zazen, Arthur Braverman quotes Sawaki Roshi as saying, "Zazen is basically becoming intimate with the self – the Dharma of becoming you."  Sitting without gaining mind or ideas about the five skandhas lets you fully manifest True Self.  Then we can become intimate with our ourselves based on our own direct experience rather than having that experience mediated by our thinking.  Okumura Roshi would say that’s five skandhas no longer clinging to five skandhas.

All this makes intimacy sound like a good, wise and skillful thing, and yet the gate statement says being impartial, without enmity or intimacy, is also a good, wise and skillful thing.  Both of these are true, and now we get to consider going beyond intimacy and enmity.  If we see and deeply understand the intimacy of the individual self, we can also see the intimacy of the universal self.  If we can see through our ideas about intimacy, we can get to true intimacy.  It’s another case of using our karma to transcend our karma.

There’s a famous story about a 10th century Chinese monk called Fa-yen who got caught in a snowstorm and took refuge with another monk called Lo-han.
Lo-han asked Fayen  “Where are you going?” 
Fa-yen eplied, “I am traveling around on pilgrimage.” 
Lo-han said, “What is the purpose of pilgrimage?” 
Fa-yen replied, “I don’t know.” 
Lo-han said, “Not knowing is most intimate.”

If Fa-yen had had an idea about his pilgrimage, he would have missed a lot of things.  He might have experienced only those things he was prepared to expect or experience.  Just approaching each moment with a spirit of inquiry and accepting it for what it was meant he could be really intimate with it, without the barriers of preconceptions.

In the Shobogenzo Zuimonki, Dogen says something similar about intimacy in zazen:
In Zen, the Way is attained with both body and mind. If you contemplate Buddhism with the mind alone, you won’t be able to attain the Way in ten thousand kalpas, nor in a thousand lifetimes. You attain the Way when you let go of your thoughts and give up intellectual and conceptual understanding. Those who gained satori by seeing blossoms or hearing sounds achieved it through the body. Therefore, if you cast aside completely the thoughts and concepts of the mind and just do zazen, you attain to an intimacy with the Way. The attainment of the Way is truly accomplished with the body. For this reason, I urge you to just do zazen.

Zazen doesn’t require us to use discursive thinking the way we have to in order to negotiate our lives off the cushion.  It’s our opportunity to put down the thoughts and concepts of the mind and take down the barriers.  Of course, the intimacy with the Way or the universe is there whatever we’re doing, but while sitting in zazen and opening the hand of thought, we might be able to experience it more directly.

Real intimacy is not the intimacy of being close with our particular friends and family or our favorite teacup.  It’s having the wisdom not to get caught up in deciding where intimacy should exist and where it shouldn’t.  Real intimacy is not having any ideas about intimacy.  Sawaki Roshi says: In everything, people follow their feelings of joy, anger, sadness and comfort. But that’s something different from everyday mind. Everyday mind means cease-fire. Without preferences, without animosity, without winner and loser, without good and evil, without joy and pain – that’s everyday mind.

Without digressing too far, let me just say here that everyday mind here is not our usual human mind of delusion and discursive thinking.  Terms like “everyday mind” or “ordinary mind” are pointing to our original direct experience before we start poking our heads in.  Sawaki Roshi is talking about the cease-fire of original experience before preferences.  Our original mind sees interconnectedness within this one unified reality and that there’s nothing outside of it, and this is how we go beyond intimacy and enmity and get to impartiality.  The Japanese word here is byodo 平等.

When we add the word onshin 怨親 we have the phrase onshin byodo 怨親平等.  It means that the enemy and the ally are equal, or that we treat hate and love alike, and it’s important in Japanese Buddhist culture.  For instance, in Japan there are stone monuments and memorial services for people who died on both sides of a battle.  The point is that the living need to transcend hatred to help the dead be reborn in Amida’s pure land, where everyone is treated equally and impartially.  When two samurai fought a duel and one died, the other would bow to the corpse and pray for him.  After a battle, warlords prayed not only for their own fallen soldiers but also for those of the enemy commander.  During the conflict, people had to fight each other, but afterward they took the larger view that intimates and enemies are equally important.  They are all loved by others, and their lives are unique and individual.  Friends and enemies are all living one interconnected life.  The practice was to let go of picking and choosing based on personal emotion, and care for everyone.

Imagine if that was what was happening in our country right now!  What a difficult, painful and important practice to see the”other side” as human beings who are doing their best to live and take care of the people they care about, and to do that sincerely, not just with nice words about healing and cooperation but actually committing to skillful action.  We’ll help you bury your dead and pray for their safe passage.

While we certainly have to recognize individuality and the particulars of various circumstances, or sabetsu 差別, we also have to recognize byodo, or impartiality or equality.  Sabetsu and byodo are two sides of one whole universe.  As I’ve mentioned at previous gates, Okumura Roshi uses the image of five fingers and one hand to illustrate seeing both difference and sameness.  Seeing how everything is different and independent on the one side and equal and interconnected on the other side is the basic view of Mahayana.  He says:  Buddha’s awakening is the way to see things equally, without any discrimination.  The Buddha’s wisdom is called Great Perfect Mirror Wisdom.  The mirror reflects everything as it is, without any distortion.  Another name of Buddha’s wisdom is byodo shochi, Wisdom Which Sees the Nature of Equality.

This is interesting: the mirror reflects everything as it is, without distortion.  Both sabetsu / distinction, and byodo / equality, are already there.  Distortion is seeing and acting on only one or the other.  There’s a contest, and then there’s cleaning up the mess.  If in the heat of the moment we can’t see any other kind of byodo, we can at least acknowledge the first noble truth: all of us who have this human form have delusion and suffering.  We have that as common ground if nothing else.  My suffering is not identical to your suffering because our karmic circumstances are different, but nobody is free from suffering, no matter what kind of front we put up.  
Rather than coming together to help each other with our suffering, to bury all of our dead and pray for all of their safe passages, we can create separation based on whether my suffering is more important, more righteous or deeper than yours.

Following elections, it’s not uncommon to take a step back and try to understand why voters supported each of the candidates.  People on all sides may cast their votes in favor of the least objectionable candidate: “I don’t like my guy, but the other guy is worse and less likely to ease my suffering.”  It can be easy to forget that we all experience suffering.  For some, that suffering is tied to a feeling of being ill-treated.  For others, it’s anxiety about their ability to provide for their families.  Still others are concerned about the effects of war, environmental unsustainability or public health.  None of these kinds of suffering is new, but depending on what kinds of communications we pay attention to, it’s possible to be completely unaware of suffering that’s different from our own.  We can set to arguing about what kind of suffering is most urgent and whose problems get solved first or at all.  In the midst of these competing forms of suffering, how do we decide which direction to take?

Sawaki Roshi says: 
Everyone should sit firmly anchored in the place where there is no better and worse.  Your whole life you’re completely out of your mind because you think it’s obvious that there is a “you” and “the others.” You put on an act to stand out in a crowd, but in reality there’s neither “you” nor “the others.”  Buddhadharma means seamlessness. What seam runs between you and me? Sooner or later we all end up acting as if a seam separates friend and foe. When we get too used to this, we believe that this seam really exists.  Poor and rich, important and unimportant—none of that exists. It’s only glitter on the waves.  [Sawaki to you]

At this point it would be easy to say yeah, yeah, here we go again with "Can’t we all just get along and be nice to each other?"  Messages about peace and harmony can get kind of trite.  If only it were that easy!  This gate challenges us to go beyond the surface niceness and look carefully at what intimacy is and what enemies are, and what it means to be really impartial and see with the eyes of Buddha.  It’s not enough just to say nice things.  We have to start with “I.”  We’ve got to commit to doing the work of asking, Where am I stuck?  What am I not seeing?  How can I come to understand the other side’s point of view?  What very common human circumstance might be giving rise to this person’s point of view?  How can I see the seam and also the seamlessness?  In what ways am I assuming seam is there, and why do I think so?  Can I see clearly my allies and the people who oppose me and also see them equally?

It’s important to remember that seeing with impartiality doesn’t mean being condescending.  I forgive you your massive delusion because I can see that you’re caught up in the three poisons, and the reason I can see that and you can’t is that I’m more enlightened than you.  This is not impartiality.  It’s just another ego trip.

Our friends and enemies aren’t identical, and we don’t have to pretend they are.  We just have to be able to see that in addition to being across the seam from each other, there is also no seam.  If we see clearly, we can at least have respect for the other side, not as admiration but as honoring someone’s feelings, traditions or point of view.  After all, the roots of “respect” are “to look back.”  It’s all about the seeing.

The view to expiate causes is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we attain salvation.
煩悩の原因を除く智慧は法明門である。それによって解脱を得るからである。   

For “the view to expiate causes,” we can read “Having the prajna or wisdom that removes the source of the kleshas or bonno.”  The end of the gate statement points us toward gaining the liberation of nirvana and becoming free from desires.

Bonno refers to our delusive, tempting desires, things that drive us to take unwholesome action.  It’s not just mistaken views, and it’s not just desires.  The problem isn’t that we want food when we’re hungry or that we aspire to have enough resources to take care of our families.  The problems start when there’s clinging based on our ideas about the self.

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 is ignorance of the nature of the self or ignorance of the three marks of existance (interconnectedness, impermanence and egolessness) as they relate to the self.  We think “I am this body or feeling or perception and anything that isn’t this body or feeling or perception isn’t me.”  We don’t understand that the self can’t exist without relation to others, that it’s subject to change, and that it’s not a fixed and permanent thing.

Gaken are egocentric views based on our ignorance, or clinging to our established views of the things around us.  We look around and create  a picture of the world, and think that the center of that world is “me.”  Then we evaluate everything we encounter in relation to what it means for these five skandhas.  That’s a pretty narrow view, and it doesn’t take into account what’s actually happening for others and for the universe as a whole, but it’s really hard to get beyond our habituated thinking and our preconceptions.

Gamon is about pride in ourselves or the opposite, shame about ourselves.  This is where we compare ourselves with others and decide whether we’re better or worse.  If we’re better, then we’re happy, and if we’re not, we feel inferior.  Everything is in relation to what it means for our self-concepts.

Ga-ai is self-love, when everything we think or say and do shows how caught up with ourselves we are and how obsessed we are with things that the self finds pleasant.

The ga 我 at the beginning of each of these is I or me.  Actually, it’s the Japanese for the Sanskrit atman.  In pre-Buddhist India there was a lower self which was impermanent—the body and personality—and a higher self which was a permanent essence, soul or atman.  The Buddhist teaching about anatman, or no fixed and  permanent self, is a distinguishing difference from Hinduism.  Instead of a permanent self, there’s only a changing collection of elements that comes together for awhile and then falls apart.

All of these four kinds of bonno or delusive desires have some connection to being self-involved to the exclusion of seeing the larger universe.  The second bodhisattva vow is bonno mujin seigan dan (delusions are inexhaustable; I vow to end them).  Delusion is 煩悩 bonno, worldly cares, sensual desire, passions, unfortunate longings, suffering and pain.  As we know, delusion is not a simple thing!  One word really isn’t enough to convey all the complexity of bonno.  We can see why they’re inexhaustable when we look at all they cover!

The first kanji of bonno is 煩 : troubles, worries, vexations, concerns, afflictions, annoyances.  It has a feeling of being noisy, fussy and distracting, something clamoring for our attention.  The second kanji 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 are 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, which comes from compulsions and habituated thinking.  We do the same things over and over and somehow don’t accept the result.

By the way, another Japanese word related to (or sometimes used for) delusion is mayoi 迷い.  In Buddhism it means maya, the illusion of thinking that duality is the real nature of things.  It’s also an everyday Japanese word with a feeling of being lost.  We hesitate and we are bewildered because we’ve lost our way.  We’ve actually lost touch with reality.  

Thus we become deluded and we believe in things that contradict ultimate reality.  We do it because of ignorance, which has the same root as ignore.  This delusion that comes from ignorance is the first kind of bonno.  Most delusions are the ignorant kind, and the way to get rid of them is to cultivate a deep understanding of the four noble truths (and therefore the nature of reality).  Any time we’re in error about the nature of reality, we can’t be our true selves.  In order to be fully awake, we have to completely understand how things really are, before we paper them over with our concepts and habits of thought.  If there’s the slightest misunderstanding, there is some delusion there and we are not able to exist in pure awareness.  Delusion is ignorance of the true nature of things.

Regardless of the form they take, delusions obstruct our ability to manifest buddha nature.  Delusion is subtle and pervasive.  It motivates us to think and act in certain ways, and then it supports those patterns and keeps them going, resulting in suffering in this phenomenal world.  Once that train is on its way down the track, it’s pretty hard to pull the brake.

There are said to be 108 bonno to overcome to reach Nirvana, as mentioned in the second part of the gate statement.  Temples and shrines often have 108 steps up to them.  In Japan at the New Year, temple bell rings 108 times in a ritual called Joya no Kane ( 除夜の鐘 protecting night bell).  The first 107 of the 108 rings are done in the old year (on New Year’s Eve), and the last one is to ring in the new year.

There is one other traditional explanation about ringing the bell 108 times.  四苦八苦 shiku hakku is an expression meaning to be in dire distress, or to have difficulty; it represents the sufferings of life.  This phrase 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 comes out to be 108.  Thus shi ku ha ku (108 bells) helps you get rid of shikuhakku (sufferings of life).

This bell not isolated up in tower the way cathedral bells might be.  It’s down on the ground or maybe one story up.  People have to be close to it in order for the sound to work as purification.  The sound is considered something like water washing over you and cleansing you of your bonno and taking away your troubles.  The physical act of ringing the bell or walking up each step is also a kind of body practice to symbolically eliminate each delusion.  Of course, it would be great if removing the causes of bonno was really as simple as standing next to a ringing bell, but we know from the bodhisattva vows that our practice is never finished and that delusions and desires will keep coming back.

As this gate says, having the prajna that removes the source of bonno is how we find Nirvana and become free from desires.  Willpower, aspiration or intention is good, but it’s not enough.  The roots are still there and the plant will keep coming back.  We need to understand how these delusions arise in the first place, and if we’re going to find Nirvana, we also have to understand that our deluded samsaric world is not separate from Nirvana.

The numberless, inexhaustible delusions or bonno arise in so many forms and ways, and it can seem like we’re fighting a fire on many fronts all the time.  In writing about bonno, Uchiyama Roshi said: Which desire is considered the worst hindrance has differed depending on time and place.  In ancient India, people thought the most troublesome obstacle for practitioners was sexual desire.  They made strong efforts to control such desires.  Later, in Shobogenzo Gyoji, Dogen Zenji said, “The desire for fame is worse than violating the precepts.”  He considered pursuing fame and profit the greatest hindrance to practice, probably because in his time, monks in Nara and on Mount Koya and Mount Hiei competed with each other for wealth and renown.  Sexual greed and desire for fame and profit are all obstacles that should be renounced by practitioners of the buddha way.  

Which kind of bonno may be afflicting us at any given time will change according to causes and conditions.  The important thing is that all these delusions have a shared starting point: five skandhas clinging to five  skandhas, or a deeply-held clinging to a concept of self.

Okumura Roshi says: Buddha accessed the source or foundation of our delusions, which is clinging to the self.  Each one of us has different kinds of delusions and different kinds of hindrances or problems but the basis of all those problems is the same.  That basis is self-clinging or ignorance about the self and ignorance about interconnectedness.  That is the way Buddha sees our delusions and he taught how to become free from them.  Buddha didn’t know what kind of delusions I have but he gave me the way to practice so I can become free from these problems.

This is related to the first bodhisattva vow as well: beings are numberless, I vow to free them.  You don’t know what others’ delusions are or what they’re clinging to, and you can’t free them from those bonno specifically.  What you can do is share the dharma in the world in ways that are skillful and appropriate.

Okumura Roshi goes on to say: You have to work for yourself to become free from your personal delusions.  We cannot release other people from their delusions but we can share how Buddha practiced and how other practitioners or teachers practice and become released from their own delusions.  I received the teaching from my teacher and that is what I’m trying to share with people.

Sawaki Roshi was getting at something related to this with his phrase “group stupidity.”  One important way that we and others get caught up in bonno is being in the midst of this group stupidity.  It’s about being swept along by what others are doing, valuing or expecting, and ceasing to pay attention to our own wisdom.  We either become paralyzed or we fall into doing unskillful things.  In commenting on this, Uchiyama Roshi said, When Sawaki coined the expression “group stupidity,” he was speaking of hindrances not only for Buddhist practitioners but for everyone in this modern age.  Sawaki Roshi was looking broadly at the result of bonno in the larger society as well as the impact on individual suffering.  As bodhisattvas, how can we liberate ourselves and others from the bonno of group stupidity?

When it comes to finding Nirvana in the midst of bonno, that’s not about waiting until we’ve extinguished all our delusive desires and then transporting ourselves to somewhere else that’s separate and better.

Menzan Zuiho (1683-1769) is an important figure in Soto Zen history.  He was heavily involved with a reform movement that tried to tie all practice activities back to Dogen’s writings and remove anything that he saw as corrupted from Dogen’s original teaching.  He wrote about the expression kyakujin-bonno (delusive desires are dust from outside) and this is Okumura Roshi’s translation:  
Original mind is like the keeper of an inn and the various kinds of thoughts are like visitors coming and going.  When one visitor leaves another one comes. Each visitor is different from the others. Some belong to high society and others belong to the lower class, some are rich and others are poor. But the keeper is always the same.  Or, when sunlight streams into a room through a window and you hit a straw mat, you will see dust rising up in clouds.

After the dust settles, there is nothing but empty space. In this analogy, thoughts are the rising dust and original mind is the empty space.  From ancient times, there have been many commentators who have carelessly misinterpreted this analogy. They have thought that arising-mind is just kyakujin-bonno; that is, delusion is like a dust that sticks to our mind. Therefore, they have thought munen-mushin (no-thought, no-mind) is our true or original mind. They have insisted on trying to eliminate thoughts by force.

He says this is a mistaken view and it happens because people don’t understand that bonno and original mind are not separate.  Customers and keeper or dust and empty space are not separate.  Delusions are just another form of original mind, which is another way to say that samsara and nirvana are not two.

There’s expression in the Mahayana tradition:  bonno soku bodai (bonno are themselves awakening).  Working with our delusions and desires is itself the practice, rather than closing ourselves off from the world and separating ourselves from what’s going on around us.  Can we transform our desires based on the small self into desires that focus on liberating all beings from suffering and on working for general wellbeing as well as our own?

When this gate says we need to have the prajna to see how bonno arise and thus we can be liberated from them and enter Nirvana, there are two ways to look at that.  One is that we need to see how self-attachment in one form or another is at the root of nearly all of our delusions and suffering.  The other is that we need to see that Nirvana is not separate from our delusion and suffering and thus we’re already there.

We don’t need to eliminate deluded thoughts by force.  Delusion begins to dissolve on its own when we understand how it arises from our clinging to self and whatever delusion remains is itself a manifestation of reality.  Sometimes we use wisdom as another word for prajna, but this isn’t wisdom that we learn from books.  Prajna is direct insight into what Buddha taught about the nature of reality.  When we see reality clearly, that’s prajna, and we stop getting pulled around by our attachments, cravings and aversions.

Questions for reflection and discussion:

• ​Which of the four fundamental bonno shows up most powerfully in your own practice?  How do you work with it?
• What do you think about delusion as temptation?  When do you feel inclined to take unskillful action even though you know it's not the right choice in the long run?
• Describe a purification practice that you do now or might be interested in trying related to removing the causes of delusion.
• What do you think about the teaching that delusion is itself prajna?  Do you have that experience in your own practice?

Knowledge of names and forms is a gate of Dharma illumination; for it clears away many obstacles.
我が身は色受想行識の五蘊（地水火風の四大元素より成る肉体とその四つの精神作用）の和合であると知ることは法明門である。それはすべての煩悩の障害を除くからである。

This English translation is a condensed version of all the elements that appear in the kanji version.  This gate alludes to a lot of things and there’s plenty to consider here.  An expanded version of the translation might be, “Understanding the harmony of the four classical elements (earth, air, fire, water) as they become the body within name-and-form, which is the first of the five skandhas, is a dharma gate because when we understand it we don’t fall prey to the three poisons and the resulting delusions that we encounter in the samsaric world.”  Whew!

First we need to talk about name and form as it relates to the five skandhas, and we need to see how the four classical elements of earth, air fire and water fit into that.  Then we need to see how understanding all these things eliminates the poisons and delusions of the world.

Let’s start with the five skandhas: form, feeling, perception, formation and consciousness.  These are the building blocks of the body and mind of small self.  To very quickly review the five skandhas, form in general means the physical, tangible things we encounter, but within the skandhas as a description of the individual person, it’s the body, including the sense organs that perceive the external world. Feeling is getting that sense information.  Perception is creating mental images and concepts out of that sense information. 
Formation is the will that acts on those images and ideas, our motivation for action.  Consciousness does the discernment and integrates the feeling, perception and formation.  Out of all that we have a sense of a self that seems to be a solid thing that persists through time, but really, it’s just a changing collection of five skandhas.

The term nama-rūpa is sometimes used interchangeably with the five skandhas, but it can also mean the simplest categories of components of the individual, the mental intangible aspects (name) and the physical tangible body (form).  This is the name-and-form referred to in the gate statement.  When nama-rūpa is related to the skandhas, the last four—feeling, perception, formation and consciousness—are nama or name and the first skandha, the four elements (earth, air, fire, water) and the form they create, are rūpa or form.

Thus the first skandha, form, is the tangible, physical aspect of life.  The other four are the psychologial or spiritual aspect.  However, these are really inseparable, because without a body we couldn’t have consciousness.  All beings carry on their practice and daily activities because of the interaction of these five skandhas.  Those operations are influenced by karmic conditions in this moment and also set up new causes and conditions that unfold.

So what’s the relationship between name-and-form, or the body, and the four elements?

Earth, air, fire and water are the basis for the arising of all forms.  Just as the five skandhas come together to make up the self, the four elements come together to make up the body and physical world.  They hold together for awhile because of their interacting energies within a particular balance or harmony.  However, we know that all things are impermanent, and that this is true of forms.  Everything arises, stabilizes, decays and dissolves.  It’s a reflection of the changing balance of the energies of the four elements, or the creative tension, we might say, between them.  After some period of time, the form can’t hold itself together anymore, and if we don’t understand how things come together and ultimately come apart, we have the three poisons and we cling to things and create suffering.

To summarize:

• The four elements are the primary components of “form” (rūpa).
• “Form” is first of the five skandhas.
• The five skandhas are the ultimate basis for suffering in the four noble truths.
• If we’re going to deeply understand the Four Noble Truths and clear away obstacles, as the gate says, we need to understand the four elements and name-and-form.

Early Buddhists contemplated the body during meditation and tried to cultivate a deep understanding that the body was made up of and still contained each of the four elements.  The four elements are said to create not only the forms we encounter but also the qualities of those forms.  Earth gives solidity, water gives moisture, fire gives heat, and wind gives motion.  Those qualities correspond to four intrinsic functions of the universe itself: earth sustains and preserves, water gathers and contains, fire matures, and wind causes growth.

This should all sound very familiar if you know the Sandokai, or Harmony of Difference and Sameness:
The four elements return to their natures, 
just as a child turns to its mother.
Fire heats, wind moves, water wets, earth is solid.
Eye and sights, ear and sounds, nose and smells, tongue and tastes
Thus with each and every thing, depending on these roots, the leaves spread forth.

It’s a description of the four elements coming together to make up the body, which includes the sense organs, and the sense organs leading to the five skandhas, and from there we create our world.

Now we get to the connection with the twelvefold chain of causation.  The first four links in the chain:
(1) ignorance or unawareness of the nature of self, thinking that the self and the world have a seperate, permanent nature
(2) conditions, the necessary circumstances that allow karmic seeds or causes to come to fruition, and those causes and conditions set the stage for things to continue to unfold going forward
(3) consciousness, the arising of a sense of self and operates through mind and senses
(4) name and form, the totality of an individual’s mental and physical components, or body and mind  

The remaining eight links are:
(5) the six senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mental faculty;
(6) contact, the meeting of the senses with their objects;
(7) feeling, the positive or negative sensations aroused by contact;
(8) thirst, the desire to possess or avoid these sensations;
(9) grasping, the physical, verbal or mental action that follows thirst;
(10) existence or becoming, the coming into existence that results from grasping;
(11) birth, manifesting in one of the six realms;
(12) decay and death, the process of aging and passing away that inevitably follows birth.

Name and form includes both body and mind and sees these things as distinct but not separate, just as the four elements are distinct but not separate from form and the five skandhas are distinct but not separate from each other.  On one hand we have all these kinds of non-separation and seeing body and mind as one piece, and on the other we see at the same time the reality that body and mind are not fixed and solid but are only changing piles of elements.

Dogen says this in Zazen Yojinki:
Just mind, just body. Difference and sameness miss the point. Body arises in mind and, when the body arises, they appear to be distinguished. When one wave arises, a thousand waves follow; the moment a single mental fabrication arises, numberless things appear. So the four elements and five aggregates mesh, four limbs and five senses appear and on and on until the thirty-six body parts and the twelve-fold chain of interdependant emergence. Once fabrication arises, it develops continuity but it still only exists through the piling up of myriad dharmas.

The mind is like the ocean waters, the body like the waves. There are no waves without water and no water without waves; water and waves are not separate, motion and stillness are not different. So it is said, “A person comes and goes, lives and dies, as the imperishable body of the four elements and five aggregates.

He’s describing how the four elements and five aggregates come together and the body and sense organs arise.  Once we have consciousness we have clinging to name-and-form, or the physical and mental aspects of the small self.  We write stories about all the data that come in through our senses, and then we start chasing after things we like and running away from things we don’t like.  From there we have the human experience that Buddha describes in the four noble truths.  Our practice is to understand that process so that we don’t get caught up in delusion about the self, which are mainly delusions about separateness and permanence.  That’s the basis for the obstacles in this gate statement that get cleared away.

Long before Dogen, Bodhidharma said the same thing: When a great bodhisattva delves deeply into perfect wisdom, he realizes that the four elements and five shades are devoid of a personal self.

We call the first skandha “form” in English, but the Chinese and Japanese word is color.  This meaning of color is anything that blocks the line of sight or cuts off our view.  That’s easy to understand in the case of walls, cars, dogs or books, but it’s more difficult when it comes to physical things like wind or glass that are clear.  Nonetheless, Bodhidharma says the elements and colors or characteristics of forms are empty, devoid of a personal self.

There are forms that are internal, related to our own bodies.  We might be in closer touch with what the four elements are doing here when we feel ill or when we physically move or take some action.  In ancient India it was said that illness was the result of the four elements being out of balance.  Earth is related to the weight and solidity of the body, water is all the fluids and moisture, fire is the temperature, and wind is movement and vibration.  When these things are in harmony, the body is healthy.  When they’re not, we have illness and death.

There are also forms that are external, not part of our own bodies.  We’re perhaps less closely in touch with what the four elements are doing in the larger world and we think we’re separate from that.  You can see that this is just another way to consider interconnection.  The same four elements make up all the forms there are.  Dogen said in Keisei Sanshoku (The Sounds of Valley Streams, the Forms of Mountains): When you bring forth your body-mind and practice, and when you bring forth the body-mind and practice of others, the power of practice with the four elements and the five skandhas is immediately actualized.

This phrase “four elements and five skandhas” (四大五蘊 shidai goun) is important.  It’s a traditional Buddhist phrase for body and mind.  It shows how the four elements that make up the external environment are also what make up the body and mind.  These things are inseparable and interconnected.  The reference to four elements is built into term for body and mind, so every time we run across “body and mind” in a text, we need to recall that it implies four elements and five skandhas.

In Dogen’s quote, the first skandha—form or the body—is very much about here-and-nowness.  It’s exactly with this body that we manifest awakening.  We can’t do it with just thinking, or just the intangible, mental skandhas.  Dogen says when we sit down, the complete functioning of each of the four elements and each of the five skandhas is immediately carried out.  

As the gate says, when we can see how name-and-form arise from the four elements, we can keep from getting caught in our delusion.  In the fascicle Yuibutsu Yobutsu (Only a Buddha and a Buddha), Dōgen says that if we don’t see clearly, we can start to pile up fixed ideas about self, add in some personal experiences and responses, and right there we’ve lost sight of the true nature of self.  Based on this faulty understanding of self, we make mistakes.  He says:  This means that we cannot see the four elements and five aggregates of the present as our self and we cannot trace them as someone else.  Thus, the colors of the mind excited by a flower or the moon should not be seen as self at all, but we think of them as our self.

Now we have some ignorance, and out of that ignorance comes delusion and hindrance and suffering.  We lose sight of the self as an impermanent collection of four elements and five skandhas.  We’re so fixated on the small self that we forget about the universal self, even though we’re already both no matter what we think or do or don’t think or do.  Instead, we need to see that the four elements are constantly changing according to causes and conditions, so the skandhas are also always changing.  We’d rather point to a fixed center we can call “I,” but then pretty soon we’re looking beyond I to the source of the I.  However, there’s really only a collection of four elements making up the skandhas, and they join together for some period of time in a collection.  We give it a name and decide whether we like it or not, and then after awhile it falls to pieces again, and there’s no part of that collection we can point to as I.

Sometimes we can see clearly how we can use the body-as-made-up-of-the-four-elements to perpetuate our delusions about self.  In order to live, the body carries out various chemical processes.  We have to eat in order for body to have nutrients and stay alive.  It’s important to take care of the body as the ground of our practice and our means of carrying out our bodhisattva work, but we all know that food can become a big part of our identity.  We eat for comfort or when we’re bored.  We choose food based on likes and dislikes and perceptions.  We eat too much of what we like, or we starve ourselves in order to look a certain way.  We interact with food for all kinds of reasons that go beyond the body’s need for wholesome nourishment.

It’s possible to care for the body without getting caught up in the three poisons.  The Chinese Zen master Huang Po said:
When the body composed of the four elements suffers the pangs of hunger and accordingly you provide it with food, but without greed, that is called wise eating.  On the other hand, if you gluttonously delight in purity and flavor, you are permitting the distinctions which arise from wrong thinking.  Merely seeking to gratify the organ of taste without realizing when you have had enough is called sensual eating.

Buddha learned early on that neither too much luxury nor too much ascetic practice are helpful in liberating ourselves from suffering.  They both reinforce some idea of a fixed and permanent self.  We have to clear away obstacles by really looking at cause and effect and how our sense data becomes larger than the sum of its parts.  How did the four elements and five skandhas become this person?
How are five skandhas clinging to five skandhas in ways that ignore reality?  How is that creating suffering for myself and others?

Our ability to be openhearted rather than self-involved rests on our understanding of the five skandhas, or name and form.  If we can’t see the emptiness of the skandhas, we’re always going to have suffering.  Of course, that’s one of the main points of the Heart Sutra.  In the very beginning of the sutra it says, Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva when deeply practicing prajna paramita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering. 

Okumura Roshi has written that generosity is based on prajna or wisdom related to the emptiness of the skandhas:
These five aggregates are the elements of all beings. Avalokiteshvara saw that there is nothing that exists other than the five aggregates, and he also clearly saw that even those five aggregates are empty. “Empty” means there is no inherent nature that makes things fixed, substantial, or permanent. Things are only collections of the five aggregates that are coming and going, arising and perishing, and gathering and scattering. But the five aggregates themselves are also empty and have no self nature. 

When we see the reality of the emptiness of the five aggregates, that is (in the case of human beings), of our bodies and minds, we can be free from attachment to them. The body is composed of rupa and the other four elements constitute the functioning of our minds. Nothing exists other than the body and mind that are conditioned and always changing.

This is a basic teaching of our tradition, so although we hear about it all the time, it’s worth coming back to and considering.  We need to have some self-identity in order to maintain our psychological health, but we also need to see how that’s created and reinforced and how we can cling to it even when there’s nothing solid we can really grasp as well as how we forget that we’re made up of the same elements as the world around us, so any feeling of being separate is an illusion.  When we really know about the processes of name and form, the obstacles we stumble over get cleared away, as the gate statement reminds us.

Right means are a gate of Dharma illumination; for they are accompanied by right conduct.
衆生を導く正しい方便は法明門である。それによって衆生は正しい行いを具えるからである。

A more complete translation of this would be something like “Guiding all beings by using proper skillful means results in all beings being equipped or prepared to engage in right conduct or right behavior.”  First let’s look at skillful means and then at how that results in right conduct.

You may know skillful means as upaya in Sanskrit or hoben 方便 in Japanese.  The basic idea is that we can use our own specific methods or techniques that fit the situation in order to move ourselves and others toward awakening.  Sometimes teachers need to get our attention or attract us to practice and the dharma, so they may use particular terms or techniques with beginners that they discard later when people are more experienced.  For instance, when I talk with the general public I don’t say zazen—no one knows what that means.  I say sitting practice or, if I have to, meditation (even though zazen is not meditation).  Once people come in the door of the temple and start to practice, they don’t hear about meditation; it’s all zazen.

Skillful means can get tricky, because it’s certainly possible to wander away from what Buddha actually taught and convince ourselves that whatever we want to do or say is skillful means.  Even though a particular view or teaching is not ultimately “true,” it may still be expedient or helpful—as long as we’re aware that what we’re doing or saying is provisional.  The Buddha or teachers and ancestors can teach and lead in this way because they’re deep practitioners with some wisdom and insight.  They know how to make use of everything at their disposal in a skillful way in order to reach the audience that’s actually in front of them.  They also know how to present complex teachings in simple language, even though what they’re describing frequently can’t really be captured in words.

However, this gate is not relevant only to dharma teachers.  We as students and practitioners can use the daily things we encounter in this samsaric world to support our own practice, even as we make effort not to cling to or perpetuate them.  Nobody likes suffering, but it gets us onto the cushion and gives us some motivation to practice.  Maybe we pay attention to dharma books and dharma talks as guides that point us toward awakening even though we know we need to do that work for ourselves; we can’t just read or listen and somehow get it.  The practice question for us is: how can we use our delusion to overcome our delusion?

Historically, we encounter the idea of upaya or hoben in a couple of related ways.  Sometimes it’s been used to critique teachings and schools other than one’s own by saying that those teachings are not the utimate truth, but merely expedient means aimed at an audience that wasn’t able to really comprehend the actual dharma.  In addition, the Chinese used upaya as a way to organize and classify the Buddha’s teachings.  Each teaching was seen as an expedient way to deal with the shortcomings of the teaching before it, and it also pointed to the more complete teaching that comes after it.  Thus there was a progression of teachings from the most basic and simple to the most complex and profound.

In any event, skillful means are critical for bodhisattvas.  They need the wisdom and compassion to see how to gear a particular teaching to the needs, experience and ability of a particular group of practitioners.  The point is to use any expedient means in order to liberate beings from suffering and introduce them to the dharma, whether overtly or more subtly.  They’re working with the potential of various different people by speaking and acting according to their specific karmic conditions.

In chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha describes how the Avalokitesvara changes his form to meet each person’s needs.  He might become a monk, a divine figure or an animal.  That’s one kind of bodhisattva skillful means.  

Sometimes skillful means is used to explain the behavior of “crazy monks” or dharma leaders that do unexpected or puzzling things.  Their answers to questions don’t seem to make sense, or they hand you a candle to help you get home in the dark and then blow it out, or maybe they seem to break a lot of precepts even though they’re supposed to be monks.  If these things really are being done skillfully, they’re being done to break us out of our habituated thinking and help us see things in a different way.  Suddenly having the rug pulled out from under us can open our eyes to the nature of self or the nature of suffering.

Of course, the challenge is to know whether behavior that seems eccentric is really upaya or simply a human mistake based on delusion.  There two famous metaphors for upaya in the Buddhist tradition.  One is the burning house, and the other is the empty fist.

The burning house comes from the Lotus Sutra.  Buddha describes a father who lives with many sons in a large house that’s crumbling and falling down.  It catches fire and the father is doing everything he can to get the sons out, but they’re busy playing and not paying attention.  He knows what kinds of toys each of the sons likes, and he tells them that their favorite toys and carts are outside, and they should come and get them while they can.  Because these are all the things the sons especially wanted, they all come piling out of the house.  Buddha asks Shariputra whether the father was guilty of falsehood, and Shariputra says no—if the lives of the sons were preserved, then they already had a plaything.  The father was simply using expedient means to save their lives.  It’s an illustration of the Buddha using various kinds of teachings to get people to see that they’re in the burning house of samsara and move them toward liberation.  He’s teaching them in the ways that they like best so they can take in what he’s saying.

In the sutra the Buddha also explains the three vehicles of Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism as three kinds of expedient means.  First, the Buddha preaches the three vehicles to attract and guide living beings, but later he employs just the Great Vehicle to save them.  Why?  The Tathagata possesses measureless wisdom, power, freedom from fear, the storehouse of the Dharma.  He is capable of giving to all living beings the Dharma of the Great Vehicle, but not all of them are capable of receiving it.  Shariputra, for this reason you should understand that the Buddhas employ the power of expedient means, and because they do so, they make distinctions in the one Buddha vehicle and preach it as three.

In the empty fist metaphor, in order to get the attention of his crying children a father holds up his empty fist, saying there is something inside it.  Sometimes he’s holding golden leaves in his fist to give the impression there’s something gold inside.  It’s a popular metaphor because emptiness is one of the things we so often have to approach by skillful means, and frequently hear that all teachings are expedient means and are themselves empty of any fixed self-nature.  In the beginning we may be afraid of emptiness or decide we’re not interested, so teachers have to get our attention.  They have to get us to move from focusing on the thoughts and distractions that arise in our minds to focusing on the ground of those thoughts and distractions.  What’s underneath them?  How do they arise?  How are we grabbing and interacting with them in order to create a self?  

Thinking there are golden teachings inside the empty fist can attract and motivate us to practice and stop crying like the children, and at some point we understand emptiness and can let go of our delusions and suffering as well as the teachings.  We can see beyond gold leaves to the emptiness of the fist itself.  While we acknowledge the existence of skillful means, we also have to be careful not to get stuck there.  It’s the old finger pointing at the moon and the warning not to mistake the finger for the moon.

To go back to the three branches of Buddhism in the Lotus Sutra, Okumura Roshi says:  "In Buddhism, skillful means are important.  Those different paths are considered to be skillful means to encourage people not to stop practice.  Teachers and teachings show a kind of a goal that encourages practice, and when a student reaches that stage, the teacher shows the next goal.  That’s the way a student practices with encouragement.  That’s the meaning of stages in Buddhist practice, but Dogen Zenji says our practice [of shikantaza] is very unique.  He doesn’t use this kind of skillful means."

This means practice and awakening are not two, to which we’ll come back in a moment.  There are no stages in zazen, with one thing leading to the next.  We just sit down and open the hand of thought.  

The gate statement says that if we use skillful means, then people are prepared to engage in right conduct.  What is right conduct, and how do the two elements of this statement work together?  Back at Gate 26 we considered dharma conduct—conduct that arises from prajna or wisdom, as opposed to unwholesome conduct driven by the three poisons.  Skillful means and right conduct are connected because each one reinforces the other.  When we see the universe and ourselves clearly, we act skillfully for the benefit of all beings.  That skillful action or right conduct moves us ourselves toward insight into reality and away from suffering.

One of Dogen’s most important teachings is that practice and awakening are not two.  Without action, awakening is not realized; without wisdom and compassion, our actions are not skillful.  Paying attention to what we do and the way we conduct ourselves is necessary in addition to whatever dharma study or other kinds of practice we may be doing.

At Gate 26 we saw that right conduct is what happens in the reality of this moment, not an abstract theoretical idea.  Our idea about what right conduct is will never match the reality of the circumstances right now that change moment after moment, so our concept of right conduct is not the same as right conduct.  Also, we can’t act in the past or in the future, so this moment is the only opportunity for right conduct.  When it comes to skillful guidance about ethics and morality, we really need to understand that guidance is helpful, but it’s an idea.  Certainly we can discuss good and bad and precepts and guidelines and all of those things, but when the moment comes to act, that's the reality.

How do we use skillful means to equip bodhisattvas for right conduct?  Those skillful means need to provide guidance on two things:  interconnectedness and cause and effect.

It’s important to understand interconnectedness from the point of view that what we do affects others, and from the point of view that our suffering or unhappiness is not something “out there” that randomly arrives on our doorstep.  It might seem to us that what we do and what others do is disconnected, or that what we do is our own business and no one else should care, or that our actions and the results of our actions are separate.  However, it’s difficult to live ethically if we don’t understand that what we do has a bigger footprint than just the consequences for us.  If I think that I live and act in isolation, then it doesn’t matter what I do and I don’t worry about any effect on others.  Once I see that everything is connected, then naturally I can feel some responsibility to live in a wholesome way and engage in right conduct.

The other important piece is cause and effect, and the message is similar:  right conduct leads to liberation from suffering, and unwholesome conduct leads to suffering.  If we can see clearly and act skillfully, we can keep ourselves out of the hell realms driven by the three poisons, so we have some control over our circumstances and the level of suffering with which we’re dealing.  Suffering isn’t something that arrives randomly from somewhere else.

Belief in cause and effect is one of the most important teachings in Soto Zen.  Dogen addressed it several times in the Shobogenzo.  One of his most important points was that we may not see the result of our conduct right away, and it might not look the way we expect.  That’s true of our individual day-to-day actions and also for the actions we take as skillful means of guiding others.  We do the best we can to guide others to recognize interconnectedness and that actions have outcomes, but we can’t always predict and control what happens as a result of that guidance.  

Again, this gate applies to us whether we’re dharma teachers or not.  As bodhisattvas, our aspiration is always to model right action or right conduct.  When we receive precepts or participate in the monthly ryaku fusatsu, we hear the Kyojukaimon, Dogen’s instructions on the precepts.  Among other things, it talks about the three pure precepts: embracing moral codes, embracing beneficial actions and embracing all living beings.  In the section on embracing beneficial actions, it says that this is itself awakening and that This is the way in which one should practice by oneself and the way in which one should lead others.

We’re all responsible for providing guidance about nonseparation and cause and effect all the time, but not necessarily by being dharma teachers or giving formal instruction.  Simply doing actions that help other beings is skillful means, and those beneficial actions equip others to take beneficial action themselves.  As bodhisattvas we are always demonstrating how to move through the world with wisdom and compassion, not because we’re better than anyone else but because wisdom and compassion are what happens when we see clearly and we’re not pulled around by delusion.  Our challenge is to do this in a way that’s not self-conscious: look at me, what a great and inspiring role model I am!

For instance, when I used to deploy with the Red Cross for disaster relief during hurricanes or wildfires, I wore a bright red RC reflective vest even when traveling to the site.  Sometimes people in the airport would stop me to say thanks or ask about what I do.  Frequently they would say they felt inspired to do something in own their communities too as a result.  That was precisely why I wore it—to put a service presence into the world and show that it’s possible to participate in this way.  I considered it skillful means.

Now, I need to not cling to that and write a story about my great self, taking those thanks personally and getting a big head.  I don’t know that anyone actually volunteered for anything or gave to the Red Cross.  I could have just be an interesting incident in their day.  However, I could have prepared someone to take bodhisattva action herself by showing that a person from Indiana is not separate from what’s happening in South Carolina or Oregon, and that the actions of Red Cross workers on the ground, providing meals and beds and medical care, are making a tangible difference.

One of our challenges in these modern times is that skillful means can become spiritual technologies that get divorced from the context of the rest of the eightfold path.  Once I gave a talk to a Japanese culture class at Purdue, and one of the students asked “how you guys feel about the commercialization of Zen,” meaning things like Buddhas being used as home decorations, or zazen being turned into corporate mindfulness programs.  I thought it was quite a perceptive question, and it’s relevant to our topic here.  Can something like mindfulness be skillful means if it’s not accompanied by teachings about sila, or ethics?  Are we preparing people to be wise and compassionate, or just to be more efficient workers or more focused on themselves?  They can learn “mindfulness” from an app or a YouTube video, and one could legitimately argue that at least they’re being exposed to some kind of contemplative practice, and maybe they would never come into a dharma center and would otherwise never be exposed to any kind of dharma.

However, using mindfulness to learn to pay attention can make you a better bodhisattva, but without the ethical context and the teachings about wisdom, it can also make you a better assassin!  Mindfulness in the Soto Zen tradition is about not forgetting Buddha’s teachings and not forgetting to practice, not about paying attention to your blood pressure.  Thus it’s an open question whether this kind of thing is a skillful means that prepares people for right conduct or not.

There are also some interesting questions in this gate about sangha building.  What do practitioners need to know and know how to do in order to take their practice into the world?  How do we equip novices to be good dharma teachers and to use all of their karmic conditions to share the dharma?  As Sanshin’s senior dharma teacher, these are questions I think about all the time, but I think they’re also relevant for board members, practice leaders, and for the sangha as a whole.  Soto Zen is relatively new in North America, and we’ll need to develop create and flexible answers to these questions while keeping the spirit of our ancestors’ practice alive.

Pursuit of abundant knowledge is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we truly reflect on the form of the Dharma.
多くの教えを求めることは法明門である。それによって物事の真相を正しく悟るからである。   

This is the third gate in a row that’s about seeking or pursuing something (求める motomeru).  A couple of gates ago, it was the meaning of the dharma.  Last time it was prajna.  This time it’s abundant knowledge, but this isn’t just any knowledge—it’s teachings.

The second half of the gate statement is about truly reflecting on the form of the dharma.  The literal translation is "precisely perceiving or understanding the real situation of everything, or the truth of all things."  Perceive or understand here is 悟るsatoru, with same root as satori; thus this is the understanding of awakening, not an intellectual understanding.

A couple of gates ago, when we talked about the meaning of the dharma, we were talking about dharma in the largest sense—how the universe functions, or how reality works—and we saw that at the core of that was emptiness.  This time we’re talking about dharma in the sense of teachings.  As we know, there are three kinds of three treasures: manifesting,  maintaining and absolute.  The kind of dharma we talked about last time was absolute.  Now we need to talk about the other two, manifesting and maintaining.

We could say that we can’t really pursue dharma in the absolute sense because it’s already here, but with dharma as teachings, we can make some effort to come in contact with them, take them on board and consider them.  The manifesting version of the dharma treasure is what Shakyamuni the human teacher actually taught, how he practiced with his own sangha, and how the dharma-as-teachings first manifested in the world.

The maintaining version of the dharma treasure is how the teachings are being made available today, not only what we’re reading in sutra books or dharma publications and not only what our teachers are saying, but also how we’re working with those teachings ourselves.  What’s our experience and understanding of those teachings?  How are we living with them every day and carrying them into the world?

When this gate says “abundant teachings,” it’s not kidding.  Starting with the teachings that have been written down, there are tons and tons of canonical writings in Buddhism.  We don’t have one or two convenient books, like the Bible.  The oldest texts are known as the Pali Canon.  The things that Buddha said were transmitted orally for several centuries before they was written down.  Eventually the sangha got together and decided what teachings were legitimate and valid, and they made three groups of teachings, known as the three baskets or tripitaka: the words of the Buddha (sutras), the words of his close disciples on metaphysics (abhidarma), and monastic regulations (vinaya).  Theravada Buddhism looks to this Pali Canon as its set of scriptures, and these alone are abundant.  They’re said to fill more than 12,000 pages in about fifty hardbound volumes, taking up about five linear feet of shelf space.

Then the Mahayana came along and developed the bodhisattva ideal:  everyone should put off his or her own liberation in order to first liberate all beings.  That came with its own set of additional teachings and texts, and these were quite different in style and tone from the early ones.  Somehow these new texts had to take a legitimate place in the Mahayana canon along with the original Pali Canon, but the Buddha had long since died, so clearly these couldn’t be the actual words of Shakyamuni.  Instead, these new texts were said to have been hidden for about 500 years since the time of the Buddha, or that they were the words of Buddha but he had given these teachings in circumstances where they couldn’t have been recorded in the original canon; perhaps he’s in a heavenly realm or in some form other than human.

These texts are still called sutras, like the Lotus Sutra or the Prajna Paramita Sutra, but they sound pretty different from the sutras in the Pali Canon.  The early sutras are fairly practical and down-to-earth, but the Mahayana sutras are ornate and full of heavenly scenes with various buddhas and bodhisattvas and things magically appearing.  They can seem quite devotional and they preach about how to be a bodhisattva and be selfless, compassionate and wise.

On top of all those texts, over time various other texts have come to be important to practitioners depending on the sect or dharma family.  Of course, all of these texts had to be translated from one language to another as Buddhism moved across the world, and things got changed in those translations.  Syncretism happened as Buddhism encountered various new cultures, and skillful teachers emerged who wrote commentaries, manuals and other kinds of texts that provided real help for practice.  For instance, when Chan arose in China, koan literature developed, stories of encounters between masters and students.  In Soto Zen we think Dogen and his writings and commentaries are important and central to our practice.  All of these texts are not sutras, and even the sutras are available in languages other than Buddha’s original language—but we still revere them as the dharma treasure.  

One of the reasons we have so many teachings and texts that we consider important is the nature of Buddha’s awakening.  He didn’t have some magical experience that was reserved only for him; he wasn’t special or chosen.  The basis for his teaching was that we are already awake, buddha nature and emptiness are already here, and that each of us has to do our own work to liberate ourselves and others from suffering.  If he’s not the recipient of special revelations and all practitioners are already awake, then the teachings of his disciples and their disciples down to modern teachers can be completely legitimate

Another reason there are so many teachings is that in the Mahayana the Buddha adapted his message based on the circumstances of his audience.  It sometimes seems that he teaches one thing to one group and then says the opposite to another group.  That’s explained in the tradition by saying that each group or person needed something different in that moment, but it means that there is a variety of different teachings.

Let me just insert a reminder here that it’s fine to read around in the larger Buddhist tradition; there’s certainly plenty of material to work with.  However, if you’re feeling confused about what you’re reading and why this doesn’t seem to agree with that, pay attention to the sect, school, time or place of the writer.  The reason there are so many schools of Buddhism is that each has a different perspective.  That can be very helpful, but if you’re reading about tantric visualization practice and then coming to Sanshin to learn more about it, you won’t be successful.

Now related to abundant teachings, of course we have to say a few words about the position that arose within Chan in China that insentient beings preach the dharma.  There are myriad insentient beings, and if they’re all preaching the dharma, that’s an even more immeasurable amount of teachings.  The traditional Chan story goes that a student asked his teacher, “If the insentient actually possess Buddha nature, can they preach the dharma or not?” 
The teacher replied, “They preach magnificently, they preach continually, and they preach eternally without a moment’s pause.” 
Student: “Then why is it that I do not hear it?” 
Teacher: “Just because you yourself do not hear it, it does not mean that others do not hear it.”
Student: “Then who can hear it?”
Teacher: “All the sages hear it.” 

This is a famous story; Dogen and Keizan both wrote about it.  It returns us to emptiness as the meaning of the dharma.  The point is that when we are standing up in emptiness, we’re not making any distinctions between sentient and insentient, or ordinary people and sages, or anything else.  That’s the moment when we see the suchness of each thing we encounter.  That suchness or emptiness is the dharma preaching of insentient beings.

An object is sitting there completely manifesting suchness without any hindrance or unclarity.  The question is, can we hear it preaching the dharma?  Can we hear those teachings?  If so, then we’re surrounded by abundant teachings in every moment no matter where we are.  If we really get that, that’s awakening, and that’s the second part of this gate statement.  Again, that precise understanding is satori or awakening.

Satori is a term more common in Rinzai than in Soto Zen.  It refers to a sudden insight into one’s true nature.  Practitioners focus on study, koans and working with a teacher in addition to sitting practice.  Everything is aimed at having this kind of breakthrough, but satori is considered only the first step toward fully manifesting buddhahood.  One still needs to deepen one’s insight in a lasting and mature way.  One is supposed to have many instances of satori, supported by continuing practice.

Soto Zen instead simply emphasizes silent illumination, or zazen, and we’re not aiming at any outcome, like a breakthrough or peak experience.  Dogen felt that Zen practice was about something larger than attaining a momentary mystical state; in the Zuimonki he wrote: It is said, “Even a thousand acres of clear fields is not as good as a bit of skill that you can take around with you.”

The thousand acres of clear fields is the spaciousness we experience when we have that insight into emptiness, but he says that that moment of insight isn’t the endpoint.  Seeing the way that Buddha sees isn’t something that happens like a flash of lightning but something that’s happening all the time, so it’s something we can take around with us (in his words).

Sometimes these two schools, Rinzai and Soto, are characterized as sudden and gradual, and another way to describe the difference is linear and nonlinear.  Rinzai folks are practicing in a step-by-step way toward satori, while Soto folks are experincing that practice and awakening are not two, or practice is itself satori.

Sekkei Harada, a modern teacher, wrote something I find helpful: The objective of Zen practice is to graduate as quickly as possible from zazen and return to the time before you knew anything about zazen.  Our shikantaza doesn’t have any meaning outside of itself, and zazen, work, study and ritual are interpenetrated in that they are all satori.  We don’t have to wait to get on the cushion.  We can be receiving abundant teachings and manifesting satori at any time in the midst of any activity or circumstance.  All the functions of body, speech and mind are awakening.

In any case, satori is about seeing emptiness, which everyone agrees is important.  In the world of Soto Zen, satori is the same as bodhi—a state of mind that is fully and accurately aware, as when one is awake rather than asleep or dreaming. To have (or be in the state of) bodhi or satori is to be a buddha, an “awakened one,” free from the delusion (迷 mayoi) that characterizes ordinary living beings.

In the broadest possible sense, emptiness or awakening or satori are already here.  There’s no need to sit zazen, open the hand, drop off body and mind, spend time with sutras, do mindful work or engage in liturgy.  And yet:  can we say that in the midst of all that we precisely understand the truth of all things?  Most of the time: no!  Thus we immerse ourselves in the abundant teachings, whether in the form of dharma study or in the form of dropping our self-involvement so we can hear insentient beings preaching the dharma.  In other words, we’re not separate from emptiness, but we usually aren’t aware of that emptiness.  In Dogen’s Genjokoan there’s a famous section about a bird’s domain being the sky and a fish’s domain being the water.  It’s not possible for them to step outside of their domains to understand them.  That’s a description of our life in suchness, emptiness or awakening.  We can’t understand emptiness, or the precise truth of all things, by stepping outside of emptiness.  We can only understand it by being completely integrated with it.  

Again, in the broad perspective there’s nothing we need to do—we’re already integrated with the universe—but our limited perception means we don’t see or understand it.  An important point here is that that limited perception doesn’t hinder the universal self or emptiness or awakening.  Emptiness is going along and functioning just fine no matter what we think or understand.  It’s the same with the abundant teachings being preached by insentient beings—as it said in the story I told earlier:
“They preach magnificently, they preach continually, and they preach eternally without a moment’s pause.” 
“Then why is it that I do not hear it?” 
“Just because you yourself do not hear it, it does not mean that others do not hear it.”

We’re already connected with everything that’s going on.  We just need to accept that we’re already part of it,  Okumura Roshi calls this becoming one piece.  It’s true that in the world of form we need to make distinctions.  We can’t ignore that or else we can’t function and we just become sort of inert and foolish.  We also can’t pay attention only to the world of form, because it’s not the whole story and we just become crazy.  This is Uchiyama Roshi’s teaching about the need for balance between wanting to be passive and peaceful and wanting to be active, creative and intellectual.

We need to pay attention to teachings about both of these aspects of our lives.  Yes, Dogen wrote some elaborate philosophical stuff, but he also wrote instructions about how to brush your teeth and use the toilet.  It’s all practice, whether we’re standing, walking, sitting or lying down—and it’s all a source of teachings.

Precisely understanding the truth of all things is being free from delusion and the underlying three poisons.  It’s giving up attachment to the small self while not negating or annihilating the small self.  From the point of view of emptiness, there is no small self and no delusion, so it’s not that these things have disappeared.  It’s just that we’ve put boundaries around things in our lives and experience and then separated from them, giving them names and forms and starting to cling to them.

Satori is a return to our original condition, where we deeply understand how our perceptions and attachments arise and we see that these things have no substance or self-nature.  Ironically, one of the attachments that arises is to the satori experience itself.  If you have some kind of opening. you don’t want to let go of it.  When it fades, you want to have that experience again.  In that way, insight can impede insight.  It’s kind of the opposite of using form to transcend form or using the abundant teachings to transcend the abundant teachings.  In addition to five skandhas clinging to these limited five skandhas, five skandhas are clinging to emptiness.

Bankei was a wandering Zen master in the 17th century, and he said about this:  Since your Unborn Buddha Mind hasn’t been realized, you can’t manage smoothly in your daily affairs. In exchanging it for something like “the empty sky,” you’re obscuring the marvelously illuminating Buddha Mind.

Since we’re not yet able to see through all our delusions and the stuff that arises from the three poisons, we have suffering in our daily lives.  If instead of clinging to forms we cling to the empty sky (satori, non-attachment, emptiness, awakening), we’re just trading one delusion or attachment for another.  We can actually become attached to non-attachment.

Nonattachment doesn’t mean we don’t have a direction or goals.  If we didn’t have some aspiration or vow, we could ignore all these abundant teachings and what they point us to.  What’s missing is our preoccupation with the goal while we’re carrying out the activity, whether or not we’ve achieved it.  What’s also missing is any effect of this success or failure on our self-esteem.  In other words, we’re not using our activity to build our identity.  That doesn’t mean we don’t take our practice or our life activities seriously; Dogen even took going to the toilet seriously as practice!  Activity is expression of universal self as well as individual self.  It doesn’t have or need any meaning or value outside of itself.

We’ve seen here that insentient beings are teaching us all the time, but if that’s true, then we ourselves must also be teaching all the time with our activities.  It might be that we’re being big brothers and sisters in the dharma for our sangha friends and being good examples and role models of practice, whether that’s in an official or conscious capacity or not.  It might also be that the teaching and learning that’s happening is between ourselves and ourselves.  Simply paying attention to our own behaviors and what we do skillfully or unskillfully is a hugely abundant source of teachings!  If we’re listening, we’re preaching to ourselves all the time.  Sometimes those teachings are hard to hear, but our job as bodhisattvas is not to look away.  Our own day to day lives are full of abundant teachings.  Whether inside or outside of formal practice, we have myriad opportunities to precisely understand the truth of all things.

I’m going to leave you with a fun bit of writing by David Llano, a debater who compares a more linear, Rinzai-style debate style with a more nonlinear Soto-style debate style.  (Unfortunately, the original post is no longer available online.)  He describes the usual logical way that folks prepare for debate; they move from inspiration to inspiration, maybe looking for inside information on the right trick or strategy they need to win: Perhaps if you are nice enough, or lucky, or attractive, one of the enlightened masters will take you aside and confer upon you the transmission of the secret truths that will bring  you enlightenment. They will help you figure out the trick to it, and you can one day, in one round, in one speech hit satori and the debate world will crack like an egg.

This writer compares that with what he calls the Soto style: Soto debate is a bit rarer. This is the practitioner who sees little distinction between being a “good debater” and being a “human.” The practice bleeds into daily life, and daily life bleeds into the practice. They of course admire the success of the skilled, but recognize it was not because of a moment of satori that success was achieved. Daily sitting, daily “work” on debate was essential. When you are sitting Zazen, you are doing Zen, which means you are practicing it. There’s nothing more to do. When you debate, you are a debater, whether you make bad arguments or not. You are a practitioner. Debating is not an instrumentality, it is the goal. When you debate, you debate. You are not trying to open up something, it’s open. You opened it. This is the Soto approach.

Love of Dharma illumination is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we attain Dharma illumination.
法の智慧を求めることは法明門である。それによって法の智慧を得るからである。   

This is a mouthful and it doesn’t seem to say much.  We’ve got three things being translated as “dharma illumination,” but the kanji for these are not the same.  Two of them are actually the “prajna or wisdom of the dharma” rather than “love” of dharma illumination; the word actually means seeking or pursuing (求める motomeru).

Last week we considered our aspiration to understand the meaning of the dharma, which is related to emptiness.  This week we’re talking about our aspiration for prajna, which is also related to emptiness, so we get to talk about what prajna is and how we seek it.

One of the most basic elements of Buddha’s teaching is the Eightfold path, and that’s where we as practitioners probably first encountered teachings about prajna.  In the Sutta-Nipata, among the earliest Buddhist scriptures, Buddha says “One who possesses the strength of wisdom, born of the moral precepts and restraints, who is tranquil in mind and delights in meditation, who is mindful, free from attachment, free from fallowness of mind and intoxicants, is called a sage by the wise.”  He’s describing the three parts of the eightfold path, or three aspects of our practice, wisdom (prajna), precepts (sila), and meditation (samadhi).  All Buddhist traditions have these three elements.

The prajna section of the eightfold path includes right understanding or right view and right intention.  In early Buddhist teachings, this is a linear path that starts with leading an ethical life so we can sit properly and gain insight or wisdom.  Zen and Mahayana in general sees this not as one thing leading to another but as all elements arising together and being practiced together, so we can pull out the prajna elements and talk about them, but it’s not that we’re practicing in order to someday attain prajna.  We’ve frequently heard Dogen’s teaching that practice and awakening are not two.

Right Understanding means we understand what Buddha taught about the nature of suffering and delusion.  That pretty much encompasses everything else: emptiness, impermanence, no self, interconnection, three poisons, etc.  It all comes back to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path.  Being ignorant about how this one unified reality actually works is the source of all our delusion and suffering, and the flip side is that when we do understand what Buddha was teaching, our own suffering doesn’t arise and we don’t perpetuate suffering for other beings.

Right Intention is sometimes called Right Thought because the next two elements of the path are Right Speech and Right Action, and body, speech, mind are the three things we use to create karma.  Right understanding and right intention arise together because when we see ourselves and the universe clearly, we don’t get caught up in delusive thinking.  Our motivation moves away from gratifying the craving and aversion of the small self and toward doing what’s wholesome for all beings.  Within the eightfold path, understanding and intention are prajna.

According to Dogen, seeking after prajna means doing zazen.  He says it’s nothing other than dropping off body and mind, sitting in zazen, opening the hand of thought, not clinging to ideas about anything, just being there without any separation from rest of the universe.  Prajna is what’s there when we let go of thoughts and get out of the way.

Of course, one of the places we most frequently encounter prajna is in the first line of the Heart Sutra: “Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing prajna paramita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering.”  Dogen wrote about this line in Shobogenzo Makahannya Haramitsu.  He says that not only is clear seeing itself prajna, the five aggregates are the five-fold prajna.  Then he says that the six senses coming into contact with the world and giving rise to perceptions are 18 instances of prajna.  The four noble truths are four instances of prajna, the paramitas are six instances of prajna, and he goes on to say that various other lists are all instances of prajna.

Where the Heart Sutra goes through a list of things and seems to say that they don’t really exist, Dogen says they’re all prajna—and here’s where we come back to emptiness.  Again, quick review:  emptiness, suchness or  thusness is the teaching that no conditioned things have a separate or permanent self-nature.  There is nothing we can point to in anything we encounter and say, There!  That’s the unchanging, essential nature of that thing!  There is emptiness because there is impermanence and interconnectedness; everything is changing all the time and there’s no real separation between one thing and another, so nothing has a separate or permanent self-nature.  Prajna is about seeing emptiness.

How do we seek prajna, or learn to understand emptiness?

Okumura Roshi says: Zazen itself is prajna—seeing the emptiness of all things as they are, without our mind’s incomplete map of the world. In the first sentence of the Heart Sutra. we can clearly see that prajna is something to practice. It is not a technique for using our brain. In this practice of prajna, we have no subject and no object. Everything is just as it is. Avalokitesvara is nothing other than the five aggregates. Five aggregates see the five aggregates as empty.  Avalokitesvara sees himself as empty. 

Aspiring for prajna means we study ourselves and the universe both by getting on the cushion and by carrying out the other activities of the eightfold path.  In other words, zazen, work, study and ritual are all gateways to prajna.  They’re not actually separate things.

We have to be careful about thinking that prajna is a special mystical thing available only to magical Buddhas or locked up in books is a library somewhere.  We can’t get it from somebody or learn it by studying Dogen texts or Okumura Roshi’s writings or anything else.  It’s very much about what we’re doing while living this moment.

Kodo Sawaki says in Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo, “By seizing the sword of wisdom with its prajna point and diamond flame, we seize life afresh, authentic life, life at face value, here and now.”  He’s evoking the image of Manjusri here, the bodhisattva that represents wisdom.  Prajna isn’t intellectial wisdom that we get from memorizing stuff; just like emptiness, it’s not anywhere other than here and now and it’s not being practiced by beings other than us.  This is what it is to be a bodhisattva, manifesting prajna moment by moment.

Our dharma cousin Tonen O’Connor has also written about this:
We tend to think of [bodhisattvas] as magnificent beings, nearly as awe inspiring as buddhas and remote from our confused lives, forgetting that the definition of a bodhisattva is someone who has generated the aspiration to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all beings.

We become bodhisattvas the instant our hearts and minds open to our interconnectedness with all beings and the aspiration rises in us to free all beings from the conditions that constrict their realization of the full possibilities of their lives. 

Here again we have Right Understanding and Right Intention.  As soon as we understand the realities of interconnectedness, our intention or vow is to free all beings from suffering.  This is nothing other than the arising and manifestation of prajna, and it’s something we’re actually doing all the time.

Tonen goes on:
Bodhisattva-hood begins with a response that takes us beyond the confines of our self. In that moment we step onto the Path, although of course not as perfected bodhisattvas approaching the wisdom and compassion of buddhas, but more likely as “not sure I know what I’m doing” bodhisattvas, “falling down and getting up” bodhisattvas, “stumbling along” bodhisattvas. But bodhisattvas nevertheless, aspiring to enlightenment for the sake of all beings.  So it is us the Heart Sutra is pointing to when it says bodhisattvas “rely on prajna paramita and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.”

To rely on prajna means it’s something that’s already here.  As Tonen says, we’re not perfect, or as Okumura Roshi would say, we’re baby bodhisattvas.  Nonetheless, when we have that first glimpse of what the Buddha was teaching, prajna is there, and based on that prajna, we want to practice and keep going.  We’re aspiring toward prajna at the same time that we’re already relying on it.  Then our job is to actualize this already-existing prajna.  One way is sitting zazen without grasping for any result.  As Uchiyama Roshi says in Dogen Zen as Religion, “In zazen which actualizes prajna, there should be mushotoku (no gaining)”  However, everything we do with compassion and wisdom is really a manifestation of prajna.

When Dogen writes about the Heart Sutra, he says that Avalokitesvara is practicing prajna with the whole body.  It isn’t enough just to have an intellectual kind of wisdom.  It’s also not enough just to have some feeling of compassion.  Prajna actively uses the mind and heart and entire body for actualization in the world.

Okumura Roshi says, To see things as they are without discrimination is prajna. Avalokiteshvara clearly sees the reality of all beings without discrimination and performs skillful means to help each and every being.  This is the functioning of wisdom that is compassionate activities.

This is related to what Tonen was saying—as soon as we see interconnectedness, we understand that we need to help all beings and in that moment we become bodhisattvas.  That compassionate action is wisdom or prajna.  If prajna is seeing with the eyes of Buddha, seeing everything without discrimination and seeing that everything is empty, then there should be myriad opportunities in a day to actualize prajna . . . and, of course, there are.

One example is at mealtime.  In a formal meal, we chant May we realize the emptiness of the three wheels: giver, receiver and gift.  It’s just another way to talk about prajna.  There’s the earth and the right causes and conditions, somebody grew the food, or processed it or bought it or cooked it and put it on the table—all that is the piece about the giver.  Then there’s you and your family or friends, accepting the food as a way to support your practice—that’s the receiver.  The food and everything that went into making the meal possible is the gift.

With prajna we recognize that all three wheels, giver, receiver and gift, are empty of any fixed self-nature, and so we let go of our craving and aversion and the three poisons.  Okumura Roshi says:  We should practice giving or dana without attachment to this person or to that person or to that thing given. That is called the emptiness of the three wheels. That is the way when you practice dana-paramita. In order to practice dana-paramita, we need wisdom or prajna-paramita, which sees the emptiness of self, other people, and the things given.

We can see how wisdom and compassion arise together and are necessary for each other.  In order to be generous, we need to understand emptiness.  As long as our practise is based on three poisons, we have ignorance, particularly ignorance about the emptiness of everything and all beings.  Without prajna, we have attachment and craving and clinging.  When we see emptiness, we’re released from attachment and new craving doesn’t arise.  Within our prajna we see that there is nothing to which we can become attached.

When that happens in zazen, it’s shikantaza, or just sitting with nothing extra, but that’s not the only place to actualize prajna.  Any time we’re able to see all sides of reality in the midst of what we’re doing, we’re actualizing prajna.  When we do that, then samsara and nirvana are really the same.  We’re practicing with this limited body and mind and with our limited understanding as part of the human condition, but at the same time prajna and emptiness and the complete functioning of the universe are there.  This sameness of samsara and nirvana is one of the most important teachings of the prajna paramita literature.

The Heart Sutra seems to be negating all of Buddha’s teaching.  There’s no four noble truths or eightfold path or twelve-fold chain of dependent origination.  It’s saying that even those teachings are empty, and we can’t cling even to what Buddha said.  When we see that, that’s prajna.  If we can do what Avalokitesvara is doing in this sutra—seeing that we ourselves are empty—we’re practicing prajna paramita.  We see that we’re nothing more than five skandhas, and that somehow this impermanent collection of skandhas tends to cling to the idea that it’s a permanent thing, and that’s where our suffering begins.  We see impermanence, we see that there is no fixed self, and we see that ignoring all that leads to suffering.

One of the most important sources on prajna is the prajna paramita sutras, of which there are about 40; these are some of the earliest Mahayana texts.  One of the sutras says a bodhisattva is a being that experiences everything without attachment and sees reality or suchness.  The practice of prajna is central to the nature of the bodhisattva and it comes down to five skandhas not attaching to five skandhas.  Aspiring toward prajna and taking bodhisattva vows are same.  Prajna is the basis for how we liberate all beings, and as we’ll see a bit later it’s the basis for being a Buddha.

There’s an image in the eight-thousand line sutra that I particularly like.  The bodhsattva stands in emptiness by not standing on anything, whether conditioned or unconditioned.  In other words, when the bodhisattva relies on prajna paramita, he or she is not relying on anything.  The sutra goes on to say that bodhisattvas wander without a home, or without attaching to the ideas and stories humans usually write based on what comes in through the senses, and on that basis don’t set  themselves up for suffering.  Those ideas and stories, by the way, include things like “form and emptiness are not two” and “there is no fixed self nature” and “now I’m practicing prajna.”

All those things are important teachings, but the bodhisattva doesn’t stand even on those and doesn’t make a home even there.  As soon as we find ourselves grasping something--Oh!  Wait!  Open the hand and move on.  It’s like we’re reminding ourselves not to play favorites, to see each thing without discrimination, to have compassion and wisdom for everything equally, and see everything clearly, not just those things with which we want to spend our time.

Sometimes we hear prajna referred to as the mother of all buddhas.  Why?  Because you have to see all things with the eye of prajna in order to manifest buddha nature.  Prajna is the basis for all buddhas.  From the point of view of prajna, we treat everything as our children.  This is how Buddha sees us; we’re all Buddha’s children.  Ideally, parents don’t favor one child over another.  They have wisdom and compassion for them all equally.  In fact, the sutras say things like “Prajñāpāramitā itself sees all the dharmas and discerns their true nature.  As a result of this great merit, it is called Mother.”  Prajna and buddhas actually arise together, because you need the wisdom eye to be a Buddha, and when you’re a Buddha you see everything with the wisdom eye as a matter of course.  

Thus the practice of prajna is not a way to get to something else.  We don’t practice wisdom in order to get smarter or become people we like better or get something called awakening or enlightenment.  Practicing prajna is a description of how we live when we’re completely standing up in emptiness.  It’s like the precepts being a description of a life of awakening rather than a list of dos and don’ts.

The point of the Heart Sutra is to keep us from getting stuck anywhere, like wanting to get something out of our practice or wanting to cling to the teachings and use them as a permanent yardstick to measure our experiences and actions.  Even Buddha’s teachings aren’t the whole story.  Whatever he says is only a part of complete working of universe.  By the time he says it, or you read it, the whole universe has moved on, so clinging to anything, even dharma teachings, is a problem.  You want to grasp form, feeling, perception, formation, consciousness?  In emptiness, they don’t exist.  You want to grasp what comes in through your senses? That stuff doesn’t exist either.  You want to grasp the four noble truths and the eightfold path?  Nope.

Anything you want to pick up—prajna says put it down.  Don’t deny it, don’t reject it, don’t separate from it, don’t ignore it, don’t supress it—but don’t carry it around, or stand on it and think that it’s firm ground.  In zazen we get to see how that kind of mind feels.  What does it feel like when we stop bouncing from one shiny toy to the next?  What does it feel like just to rest in what’s sometimes called choiceless awareness?  Usually we don’t have that luxury.

Our aspiration for prajna or wisdom is not about acquiring knowledge or experience or anything we don’t already have.  It’s about letting go of the stuff that gets in the way.  In order to get through this gate, we have to put down all the extra baggage we’re carrying and leave it at the side of the road.  Otherwise, we miss the gate even though it’s right in front of us.

Enjoyment of the meaning of the Dharma is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we seek the meaning of the Dharma.
法の道理を願うことは法明門である。それは法の道理を求めることだからである。   

We need to look closely here at “the meaning of the dharma.”  道理 (dori) translated here as “meaning” is actually reason, logic, or sense.  道 (do) is “way” and 理 (ri) is the same word as the one in ri and ji (事), or absolute and relative.  Thus we have something like “the absolute way of the dharma” or “the logic or principle of the dharma.”

Negau (願う), translated here as “enjoyment.” actually means to desire or wish for, but the sense is to pray for.  Negau shows up all the time in Japanese ekos using the form negawaku.  In English ekos we usually say “May such-and-so happen” but Sotoshu translations might say “What we pray for is such-and-so.”  Rather than a small-self thirsting desire, this is a larger spiritual aspiration.

We should also take a moment to consider the term “dharma.”  One meaning is what the Buddha taught—what got recorded in sutras and what teachers like Dogen had to say about the content of Buddha’s teachings.  Another meaning is reality, or the way the universe works.  The Buddha said that the dharma is always here, whether or not there is a buddha to preach it or a sangha to study it.  It’s the true functioning of our lives, whether we like it, expect it, understand it or not.

Let’s put this all together.  Instead of “enjoyment of the meaning of the dharma,” we might say “aspiring for the reason or logic of the dharma.”  In other words, we want to deeply understand how the universe actually works:  how the parts fit together, how karmic circumstances unfold, how this one unified reality makes sense.  That sounds a lot like bodhicitta.  Arousing the mind of awakening makes us want to investigate the lives of the individual self and the universal self, or the self without relation to others that includes everything, that make up this one unified reality.

In section 7 of the Genjokoan, Dogen says, “When a person first seeks after the dharma, the person becomes far from the boundary of the dharma.  When the dharma is correctly transmitted to the self, the person is immediately an original person.”  This whole “seeking after the dharma” thing immediately raises some difficulty.  It means we want something and we’re running after it.  We think that’s good and OK because it’s the dharma, and yet we keep hearing that craving and aversion or chasing and escaping are the most basic roots of our suffering.  We’re far from the boundary of the dharma.

Isn’t there a direct conflict between this gate and the teachings about opening the hand and non-attachment?  Here’s what Okumura Roshi says:
I think that for most of is, we begin to practice in order to fill some emptiness, or to recover from some sort of unhealthy life.  We call this aspiration in Buddhist terms bodhicitta, or bodaishin in Japanese, which is often translated into English as bodhi-mind, awakening mind or way-seeking mind.  Isn’t this another kind of desire?  Yes, it is.  Only the object has changed.  We feel sick of living seeking after money, fame, status, etc. and we start to look for something spiritual, in our case Buddhism or enlightenment, liberation or nirvana.  Without such desire, we don’t have any motivation for a spiritual search.  

He goes on to say that in this quote from the Genjokoan, Dogen points out that in the beginning of our practice we’re still trying to fill a gap, still practicing with a greedy mind.  The motivation to practice becomes the obstacle to practice.  Can we practice without desire for practice?  If we can do that, then we’re really just sitting, and it’s not “we” who are sitting—the universe is carrying out practice through our bodies and minds.  This is where we get to understand the logic or principle of the dharma that this gate is talking about.

Bodai-shin or bodhicitta is the mind seeking awakening.  It can also be interpreted as the mind that is awake, the mind that aspires to live in accordance with reality instead of being pulled by egocentric desires that work against it.  This is the mind that’s not practicing in order to get something for the small self, like stress reduction or spiritual powers.  

Dogen says in Shobogenzo-Hotsu-bodai-shin (Arousing Bodhi-Mind), “To arouse bodhi-mind is to vow to save others before oneself, and to actually work to fulfill the vow.”  If the mind is truly awake and we really understand the nature of reality, then that vow arises naturally and our focus is on all beings, not just ourselves.  Thus the search for the dharma, or we could say the search for meaning, is a very natural part of the human condition.  It touches on at least two of the components of spiritual health: a balance/integration between individual/universe or self/whole, and a sense of purpose in life and that life has meaning.  However, there are two distinct but related searches going on here.  The search for the dharma is about understanding how reality actually works, seeing it clearly in its entirety, not leaving things out and not adding in anything extra.  Practice is about seeing with the eyes of prajna.  The other search is centered on the question of why our lives matter.  What’s the role of our individual selves within the universal self?  Is there any point to our getting out of bed in the morning?

Okumura Roshi says, Our problems begin when we follow our natural human tendency to look for meaning in our activities. We usually don’t do anything without knowing the point of that action. We ask ourselves what the outcome is, why it’s important, how others are affected and whether or not there’s a benefit for us. By extension, we look for the meaning of our lives.

I think these two searches are connected, the search for dharma and the search for personal meaning in our lives.  If we understand nature of reality, we understand nature of self.  Why is something significant, and what’s the context for that?  Bodai-shin, the mind that is awake, says: I know there’s something bigger than me, and I want to know more about that.

So, is there any point to our getting out of bed in the morning?  The answer is yes, because when we get out of bed, the whole universe gets out of bed.  We don’t get up just for ourselves, we get up for the whole universe and all the beings in it.  When we feel like that’s a tall order—living on behalf of all beings—we can remember that all beings are also living on behalf of us.  All beings are getting out of bed in the morning for us, too.  There’s no point at which beings are cut off from each other.  We can choose to ignore that connection, but that doesn’t make it go away.

The point of our lives, or the meaning of our lives, is that we’re bodhisattvas and we were so from the day we were born.  Our lives had a point the moment five skandhas took this human form, so we don’t have to worry about not having a place in the universe or something to contribute; those things are already there.  That doesn’t mean we understand how that works or how to do it skillfully, with wisdom and compassion, and for that, the practice of aspiring for the reason or sense of the dharma is helpful.

How do we investigate our questions so the dharma begins to make sense to us?  We engage in the four aspects to our practice here at Sanshin: zazen, work, study and ritual.

Zazen is how we come to understand the meaning of the dharma by sitting down and dropping off all the many ways we create separation: by labeling and making distinctions between self and others, and by clinging to our ideas about reality rather than being in touch with actual reality.  Instead we let down all the barriers and just let everything in.  As Dogen says in the Genjokoan, “Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice/enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice/enlightenment through the self is realization.”  We’re just sitting right in the middle of it all and experiencing being personally intimate with the universe.

There was a time in his life when Okumura Roshi himself had questions about meaning.  As a student, he wondered about societal expectations that everyone would do well in school, get good jobs, make money and buy impressive things.  He questioned the value of competition for wealth, power, fame and luxury.  Was this really a useful measure of what was good and what was not?  He read all kinds of things looking for answers, but Whatever I read seemed to be one person’s idea from his limited experiences in a certain time and society. I wanted to know the meaning of meaning.

Then he encountered Sawaki Roshi’s teaching that To stop looking for meaning and simply do good-for-nothing zazen seems like liberation from that endless circle of a dog chasing its tail.  We don’t look for meaning in our zazen or ask why we do it.  We just drop the barriers and let go of thoughts and questions.

Then there’s work.  That’s one way we investigate the meaning of the dharma with our activity.  At Sanshin, work practice is not just volunteer work at the temple, but the actual practice of balancing action and stillness, and of coming to understand the interconnected nature of community.  In a way, we’re doing the same thing we’re doing in zazen, dropping off body and mind in the midst of completely engaging in what we’re doing.  We can also observe the teachings in a concrete way.  If my job is growing vegetables, I see that they change over time, that they depend on seeds and soil conditions, and that they’re connected to other things around them, and all these things are also true of me.

We also come to understand how the universe works through dharma study.  In Section 10 of his Gakudo-Yojinshu, Dogen said, “There are two things for determining how to settle the body-mind; one is studying with a teacher and listening to the dharma, and the other is putting our energy into zazen. Hearing the dharma allows our minds to disport freely; zazen uses practice and verification just as we use right and left hands. Therefore, to enter the buddha-way, we should not discard either [practice or verification]. If we do, we will never accept [the buddha-way].”

Sawaki Roshi apparently summarized this section as meaning that we have to understand our practice and practice our understanding.  While it might seem that we engage in zazen for the sake of making sense of opaque texts taken up in dharma study, it’s actually the opposite.  We undertake dharma study in order to understand the nature of zazen.  Study alone isn’t enough—we have to put in time on the cushion—but without the guidance of teachers and ancestors, we’re apt to come up with our own ideas about what zazen is and go off the rails.

Finally, there’s ritual.  While work is an active engagement with the community in this time and place, ritual is an active engagement with the community across space and time.  Chanting texts integrates them deeply into ourselves just as has happened for Soto Zen practitioners across the centuries, and like the movements of work, the choreography of form and liturgy are concrete experiences of the dharma.  Our approach to ritual at Sanshin is to investigate it thoroughly with body and mind such that we’re not merely going through the motions because the calendar says it’s time to do a ceremony or we’re attached to giving an exotic performance.  We do everything we need to do, including elaborate rituals when they’re appropriate and meaningful, but nothing more.

Maybe you know this famous story about Bodhidharma.  Shortly after arriving in China from India, he visited Emperor Wu.
“What is the meaning of the dharma?” the emperor asked.
“Vast emptiness without holiness,” Bodhidharma replied.
“Who is standing before me now?”
“I don’t know.”

According to Bodhidharma, the whole point of this aspiration for understanding the universe is to understand emptiness.  Everything else makes sense and falls into place if we just get that piece, because so many other teachings are related to it.  Emptiness, suchness or thusness is the teaching that no conditioned things have a separate or permanent self-nature.  There is nothing we can point to in anything we encounter and say, There!  That’s the unchanging, essential nature of that thing!  Emptiness is basic to our practice and our understanding of everything we encounter.  It’s connected to the three marks of existence, the three characteristics of all conditioned things:

Impermanence:  Everything arises because of causes and conditions; nothing arises from nothing.  Those causes and conditions are changing all the time, so whatever arises from them also has to be changing all the time.  Without a fixed, permanent self-nature because of impermanence, everything is empty.  The very experience of deeply seeing imperanence is directly related to our aspiration for the meaning of the dharma.  Here’s how Tairyu Tsunoda,  a teacher at Komazawa University, describes it:

When one truly sees into the flux of arising and disppearing, the self-centered mind does not arise, thoughts of seeking fame and profit cease, and the mind the seeks the Way of Buddha arises.  For this reason, when this mind that seeks enlightenment -- the mind that sees into the transient nature of the world, the mind the seeks the way -- arises, we become free from the selfish, egocentric mind, the mind which seeks fame and profit.  We are then alarmed n the extremely quick passage of time.  Without wasting any tie, we practice as if we were batting away flames enveloping our head and hair.  We devote ourselves to the practice, reflecting on the uncertainty and fragility of our bodies and lives.

Our aspiration to understand the dharma supports our seeing impermanence, or seeing with wisdom or with Buddha’s eyes; seeing impermanence reinforces our aspiration to practice and understand the meaning of the dharma.

No-self:  Even though we think we are individuals who are identifiable as ourselves and stay the same throughout our lives, there’s nothing we can point to and say: There!  That’s me!  Our bodies and minds are changing all the time.  We aren’t separate from all the other beings and things in the universe or from reality or Buddha’s way.  There’s just this constantly shifting pile of five skandhas to which we give a name and a story.  However, that’s just five skandhas clinging to five skandhas.  Without a separate, permanent self-nature, even the self is empty.

Suffering, unease or unsatisfactoriness: Because of emptiness, we can’t use conditioned things to make ourselves happy and comfortable in the long term.  Those things will change or go away because of impermanence, and there is no self that we need to shore up by chasing and grasping things.  Much as we might like to deny emptiness and the three marks, when we do, we set ourselves up for suffering because that’s not how the world actually is.

There’s also a connection to interconnectedness: within this one unified reality, nothing can be separate because there’s nothing outside the Buddha way.  If everything is interconnected, then we can’t draw a boundary between this thing and that thing and say this is the self-nature of this thing which is different from the self-nature of that thing.  It’s like saying the right hand and the left hand somehow have different self natures even though they’re part of the same body.  Without a separate self-nature because of interconnectedness, everything is empty.

Thus Bodhidharma says that if we really understand that all of existence is empty and why it’s empty, we understand the workings of the dharma.  Take anything else our teachers are telling us, and you can relate it to these teachings about emptiness and the three marks of existence.  How about the Four Noble Truths and the nature of suffering? When we deny the three marks of existence, we suffer because reality doesn’t actually work that way.  We don’t want to believe that things are impermanent or interconnected and we don’t want to believe that we aren’t a “self,” but the universe doesn’t care what we think—it’s going along, doing what it does anyway, and we get a bad surprise.

How about the precepts?  Mahayana precepts are a description of how we live when we understand emptiness.  They’re not actually rules or guidelines, and we have no urge to break them when we really see how the universe works.

How about Dogen’s main teachings, for example: practice and awakening are not two?  It’s our understanding of emptiness that allows us to manifest our buddha nature or inherent awakening.  We don’t need to go out and acquire these things; they’re already here and we don’t get them by practicing.  However, when we practice based on understanding emptiness, we immediately manifest awakening without the hindrances of delusion.  Practice and awakening are not two.

Emptiness is key to our aspiration to understand how the universe makes logical sense.  Some Westerners come to Buddhism because if feels scientific.  It seems systematic and logical, and it is.  Yet Buddhism doesn’t deny that we are also emotional beings.  We appreciate friendship and art and chocolate cake.  We get upset when a loved one dies or we lose a job.  We see things around us that make us feel annoyed or grateful.

Here’s the thing:  the dharma can make sense of all of that stuff too.  Our practice lets us see what’s really happening in our moment to moment experience so we don’t get hijacked or feel like we’re being hit by a tsunami.  We can make some plan for skillful action and have some confidence that we can carry it out.  We can make bodhisattva vows to liberate all beings from suffering and have some insight into how that suffering arises and what we can do about it.  If we aspire to seek out the meaning of the dharma, we’re on the way to being better bodhisattvas.