Right conduct of the actions of the body is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] the three forms of behavior are pure.
身行正行是法明門、三業淨故.

It would be easy to think that Zen practice is mainly about what goes on in our heads.  We put so much emphasis on zazen and opening the hand of thought that we can forget that our existence in the human realm includes a human body.  What we do with this body isn’t an afterthought, or a poor cousin to what we do with our brains.  It’s a crucial element of our practice.

First we need to understand what we mean by the body in Buddhism.  It’s said that this thing we call “I” is made up of five skandhas, or aggregates: form, feeling, perception, formation and consciousness.  The first four are elements of the body (Skt. rupa), while the fifth is an element of the mind (Skt. nama).  We can see that within this namarupa, body and mind are not really separate, though we can provisionally talk about them individually.  However, body and self are not the same; the self is created when somehow the five skandhas begin clinging to themselves and writing a story about a “me” that is independent and permanent, even though the five skandhas, like all conditioned things, are impermanent and constantly changing.

Early Buddhists rejected the body as the source of distraction and defilement.  Human beings tend to cling to or avoid what comes in through the senses, and that desire is the basis for suffering.  Being free from the body meant being free from the ongoing transmigration through the realms of samsara, leaping off of the wheel of birth and death and arriving in Nirvana.

Soto Zen, on the other hand, sees the body as the ground of our practice and not as something to be rejected.  We still need to deal with what comes in through the senses, but not by detaching from them.  Instead, we make effort to see clearly what’s arising, without judgement or attachment, and make good decisions about the actions we take based on what we feel and perceive.  

Carrying out bodily activities without defilement is one of the ten kinds of karmic activity described in the Avatamsaka Sutra. (1)  This sutra provides extensive guidance to the conduct of the bodhisattva and also includes a lovely section called the Vows of Good Conduct (Bhadracaripraṇidhāna).  These are the preaching of Samantabhadra (sometimes known as Bodhisattva Universal Worthy), who is the bodhisattva of practice activity and an important figure in Zen; you may recognize him from the names of buddhas and bodhisattvas we chant at the beginning of ryaku fusatsu or during formal meals.

Samantabhadra’s ten vows of good conduct are:

• to pay homage to all the buddhas;
• to glorify the qualities of all the tathāgatas;
• to make ample offerings to all the buddhas;
• to confess and repent of all one’s misdeeds;
• to rejoice in the merits of others;
• always to request the preaching of the dharma;
• to entreat enlightened beings to remain in the world;
• to always to study the teachings of the buddha;
• to always to respond to sentient beings according to their various needs;
• to dedicate all merits to sentient beings that they may achieve buddhahood.

All of these are actions of the body that are done without defilement.  In other words, when carried out sincerely and based on wisdom and compassion rather than on greed, anger and ignorance, these vows are completely fulfilled.  However, humans being what we are, we will make mistakes despite our best intentions.  That’s why repentence partners with vow as an important part of our practice.  In fact, our repentance verse also comes from Samantabhadra’s teachings in this sutra:

For all the evil deeds I have done in the past
Created by my body, mouth, and mind,
From beginningless greed, anger, and delusion,
I now know shame and repent of them all. (2)

That brings us to the second part of this week’s gate statement, the three forms of behavior.  These are the actions of body, speech and thought, or sangō 三業, the three things we use to create karma.  (The next two gates take up actions of the mouth and actions of the mind.)

A lot of our sticky, knotted-up karma comes from stuff we do without paying attention.  It’s our habituated thinking, speaking and action.  Nonetheless, we have to take responsibility for it and try to do something different and more wholesome in the next moment.  Ultimately, right conduct of the actions of the body means that all three—body, speech and mind—are wholesome and without defilement.

That’s because, when we create karma, that process starts with thought.  We have some deluded thought that arises because of our ignorance about the true nature of reality,  We think we need to get something, or get away from something, because we don’t understand the real nature of the self.  Based on that deluded thought, we may engage in some kind of harmful speech; we get angry and we say something unkind or not quite true, or designed to get something for ourselves at the expense of someone else.

That harmful speech can also lead to unskillful action.  Conflict can escalate from just words to physical violence.  I tell a lie, and then I have to take more and more steps to cover it up.  The whole thing starts to spiral, and suffering leads to more suffering and the creation of more harmful karma for myself and others.  

At the root of this whole process is intention or volition.  The Sanskrit word is cetana.  Intention is what bridges the gap between craving or aversion and actually carrying out the actions of getting that thing we want or escaping from that thing we don’t want.  I see you have a piece of cherry pie.  I think I want it.  Based on that craving, I intend on some level to do something about getting the pie.  I tell you that your teacher wants to see you in his study, and when you’re out of the room, I help myself to your pie.  Some argument probably happens when you find out what I did.  After that, who knows?  This small internal personal craving has passed through mind and speech to become a harmful action of the body with consequences and suffering for others.  

Along with the wisdom and compassion that arise from the pure mind, we’re guided away from carrying out harmful actions of body, speech and mind by Buddhism’s system of ethics or moral codes.  The elements of the Eightfold Path form three groupings: wisdom (prajna), ethics (sila) and concentration (samadhi).  Under ethics or morality, we find Right Speech, Right Action and Right Livelihood.  In the early teachings, Right Action was mainly about not killing, not stealing and not engaging in sexual misconduct.  Likewise, Right Speech and Right Livelihood are related to the way we use the body to carry out activity in the world.  All of these are about not using the body to break precepts.

Of course not harming others with our own delusion-based conduct is a good thing, but we’re also saving ourselves from harm.  One potential outcome of our unwholesome action for ourselves is that we’re setting up a karmic pattern in which we may be predisposed to repeat the action.  We can build harmful habits that make  unskillful action the default.  If I steal once, it’s easier to steal again.  If I cheat on my partner once, it’s easier to do it again.  It’s harder to break a longstanding chain of improper conduct, even when we see the process and what’s arising.  Better by far to keep new bad habits from forming.

The body is the ground of our practice and our life.  There’s nowhere else we can practice and nowhere else we can live.  Our practice is not about ignoring or subjugating the body in order to reach a purified state; as we’ve seen at previous gates, there is nothing inherently pure or impure about any conditioned thing we encounter.  The issue is our response to it.  It’s important to strike a balance between taking care of the body in a healthy way and becoming attached to it as a way to satisfy the cravings of the small self.

We can either make wholesome choices with the body that lead to awakening and to a lessening of suffering in the world, or we can make unwholesome choices that lead to more delusion and suffering.  What we do with the body is our last chance to head off the chain of unskillfulness that begins with thought.  Deluded thoughts arise, but if we don’t turn them into harmful speech or harmful action and spill them onto others, they remain our own delusion.  Right conduct of the body at least can serve as a firewall, keeping our delusion from leaking out into the world quite so much.  In that way, actions of body, speech and mind don’t result in so much additional suffering and unfortunate karma.

One of the patterns that we notice in our practice is that there are often teachings about what not to do, but refraining from these unwholesome things isn’t enough; we also have to actively cultivate their opposites, as Samantabhadra vows to do.  Because the body is the ground of practice, it can play a positive role in making awakening possible and alleviating suffering for ourselves and others.  Keeping the precepts means we’re no threat to anyone else’s life, property or well-being and builds trust, respect and security.  Buddhist ethics are about heading off negative karma by restraining ourselves and creating positive conditions that bring harmony to everyone to avoid violence and harm.  

And, it’s not enough just to do good ourselves; we are to encourage others toward right conduct as well.  Buddha said that it’s not enough just for us not to kill or steal; we’re to encourage others not to kill or steal.  It’s also not enough to encourage others toward right conduct and then not practice it ourselves.  As the sutra says, that would be like a blind person painting a picture for others that he can’t see for himself.

All of our actions become practice and are embodiments of our Buddha nature.  That’s right conduct of the body in its purest form, where body speech and mind are free from defilement.  Right conduct isn’t only a manifestation of Buddha nature; it can also help prepare the ground for our expression of that True Self.  When we keep precepts, we create a settled, safe and stable atmosphere for ourselves and others.  Once we can settle down and open the hand of thought, we can start to see through our delusions.  When we begin to loosen the grip of craving, aversion and small self, we’re much better able to act skillfully in the world.  That skillful action perpetuates trust and stability and enables further practice.

Further reading
The Avatamsaka Sutra.  Another translation of selected sections is here.        
More on Samantabhadra.  

Notes

(1)  The other nine are carrying out activities of speech and mind without defilement, being reborn as one intends, knowing the many different desires, understandings, boundaries and karmic activities of sentient beings, knowing the formation and disintegration of the world, and mastery of oneʼs own spiritual footing so that what is practiced is unobstructed.  These are from Chapter 15, section 5.8 of the Avatamsaka Sutra.  
(2)  Chapter 40 of the Avatamsaka (or Flower Garland) Sutra.  

Love and cheerfulness are a gate of Dharma illumination; for they make the mind pure.
愛樂是法明門、令心淨故.

While the first two kanji can indeed be translated “love” and “cheerfulness,” respectively, taken together they mean to delight in or enjoy something.  Although the kanji translated “delight” in the last gate statement are different ones (歡喜), we can see how this week’s gate carries on the conversation.  However, the particular feeling of 愛樂 in a Buddhist context is a love of the good or wholesome, so this gate is not validating our inclination to indulge in anything and everything that takes our fancy.  It’s encouraging us to enjoy the things born not from delusion and the three poisons but from wisdom and compassion.

For instance, in the Ariyapariyesanā-sutta, Shakyamuni has left his early teachers and continued his search for the truth of suffering when he comes upon a patch of ground that he later describes as delightful, using the same terms as our gate statement.  He finds the grove charming and the river clear with smooth banks, and notes that there’s a village nearby where he can collect alms.  He decides that this is a place that can support his practice in a good and wholesome way.  Thus his very real enjoyment of the spot is not based on clinging and self-indulgence, but on recognizing what’s needed to enable him to cultivate wisdom and compassion. 

It might be hard to imagine an enjoyment that is not about self-indulgence.  So much of our pleasure comes from gratifying our desires.  How can we be happy in a way that’s not about chasing and getting what we personally want?  How can we take delight in what’s already here rather than pushing all of our hopes of happiness into the future, when this or that will happen or appear or resolve?  Certainly, it’s satisfying to work toward a goal and achieve it, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But what’s going on in our lives in the meantime?  Is there any contentment there, and from where does it come?

There is indeed a joy to be had in our day to day samsaric world that recognizes the fulfillment of jijuyu zammai, the totally interpenetrated functioning of the universe as it is.  This kind of joy doesn’t discount or negate the pleasure we feel as human beings in getting an award, relaxing with a good cup of coffee, watching an exciting movie with friends or sucessfully finishing a home improvement project.  Those feelings and experiences are real and fine.  It’s just that that’s not the only kind of enjoyment there is.  There is also the stable and ever-present joy that comes from deeply understanding that we and all beings are supported by the entire universe, and that we have something of value to offer in return.  This is the selfless sort of enjoyment that goes with the pure mind.

This might sound like a lot of Pollyanna, hearts-and-flowers stuff that doesn’t have its feet in the real world.  Yeah, sure, everything’s fine.  I should be enjoying shoveling snow and missing the bus and having a sore throat.  Who are you kidding?  Just as this gate doesn’t deny us the fun of pleasant experiences, it doesn’t deny the aggravation and downright unpleasantness of some things we encounter.  It does ask us to look underneath those affronts to our expectations and see whether this moment is truly and completely irredeemable.  Yes, the human experience is characterized by suffering.  Is that all?

My dharma grandfather, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, told a story about a Buddhist clergyman who had to have both legs amputated at the knee as a result of several tragedies.  Somehow he was ultimately able to see that in reality there was no before and after, no way to compare his situation at that moment with his previous life with two healthy legs or with his future as an amputee.   

“The pivotal point for him was that he chose to think: ‘Today, at this moment, I am born.’  One could think, ‘I was born with both legs, then I was drafted and forced to go to war.  Because we lost the war, I was set to Siberia as a prisoner.  On the way, my legs got frostbitten and I had to have both of them amputated.’  If we think of this sequence of events, it’s too painful even to cry.  We will be infinitely vexed and miserable.  However, Reverend Ozawa chose to think that he was born today, this moment, without legs.  That was the the turning point for him, to live with a bright and cheerful attitude.  This is not a idealistic story but his own actual experience.  Reverend Ozawa’s saying, ‘Today, this moment, I am born,’ carries infinite weight.” (1)

Being born moment after moment, can we fully enjoy this moment in its entirety?  The past has gone and the future has not yet come.  Certainly, our karmic past has shaped this moment, but we can’t reach back and change anything.  We can only act in this moment; this is the only position from which we can work.  Clinging to regrets about the past or apprehensions about the future can lead to dissatisfaction with present because we can’t see and appreciate it in its entirety.

Confronting life-changing circumstances isn’t our only opportunity to consider the nature of real enjoyment.  At Sanshin, we sometimes eat breakfast in the formal way used in training temples (senmon sodo) in Japan.  The bowl sets we use are called oryoki, which means a container that holds an appropriate amount.  We handle the bowls, utensils and food according to a prescribed set of forms while chanting several verses.  The food offering verse says, “This morning meal of ten benefits nourishes us in our practice.  Its rewards are boundless, filling us with ease and joy.”  (Se jiki ge shu yu jiri nyoi an jin kohō buhen kyu kin jo ra.  施食偈 粥有十利 饒益行人 果報生天 究竟常樂.)  The tenzo, or cook, has made an effort to serve foods of five colors and six flavors that have been cooked in a variety of ways.  In addition to appreciating the visually appealing, delicious and nutritious meal for the enjoyment it gives us, we can also take delight in its ability to enable our practice—even if one of those dishes is something we would not choose to eat elsewhere.  

This is particularly true during sesshin, or intensive retreats.  Sesshin at Sanshin consist only of fourteen 50-minute periods of zazen, three formal silent meals, and a moderate night’s sleep.  It’s very easy to turn meals into entertainment when they are one of the few sources of sensory input we encounter in the zendo, but the tenzo’s job is to feed our bodies so we can practice, rather than our imaginations so that we can spend the next few hours of zazen writing stories about our relationship with the food.  Meals should certainly be appealing, but they also have to be easy to manage using oryoki and not cause discomfort and distraction for practitioners during zazen.  Tenzos need the wisdom and compassion to take care of our practice.

This mind of ease and joy continues to permeate our activity as we return to zazen.  Zazen seems to be a very simple practice in we do only four things: take the posture, breathe softly and deeply through the nose, keep the eyes open, and open the hand of thought.  When you tell your family and friends that you’re off to the zendo for practice, they (and you, for their benefit) may describe that activity as “meditation.”  However, in Soto Zen, of course, zazen is not meditation.  We are not cogitating on some topic or seeking to remedy a problem, which are the oldest meanings of the word.  We’re also not engaged in a mental exercise designed to bring about a special state of spiritual attainment.  We’re simply resting in this moment and taking delight in things as they are.  As Dogen wrote in the Fukanzazengi (Universally Recommended Instructions for Zazen), “The zazen I speak of is not meditation practice. It is simply the Dharma-gate of joyful ease (唯是安樂之法門也), the practice-realization of totally culminated enlightenment.”

Back at Gate 2 we considered the nature of pure mind, and we saw that we cultivate purity when we’re guided by wisdom and let go of our delusions and attachments.  In general, defilement is what happens when we don’t see the universe clearly and we take action based on greed, anger and ignorance that creates suffering for ourselves and others.  This gate intersects that pure mind with enjoyment of that which is good and wholesome.  How are these two things connected?  

Let’s look again at our examples of formal meals and zazen.  Just as we may do with money, alcohol, sex, technology, or power, we can form either healthy or unhealthy attachments to food and our ideas about it, even though the food itself is neither pure nor impure.  The tenzo can try to position himself as the culinary hero, providing extravagant impressive meals under the guise of creating a compassionate, wonderful experience for practitioners.  Recipients can sniff appealing aromas coming from the kitchen and fantasize about what will be on offer, recall how good Grandma’s version of that dish always was, and begin planning next Thanksgiving’s dinner menu.  On the other hand, they may disagree with the tenzo’s notion of what an appealing or appropriate meal is and start criticizing even before the food is served.  

All of these extra activities take people away from the here and now and perpetuate deluded, habituated thinking.  If pure mind is the mind guided by generosity, kindness and wisdom—the flip sides of the three poisons—then the mind attached to food in an unwholesome way is not it, and is not in a position to take delight in that which is healthy and good.  Yet this happens all the time, and it’s based on misunderstanding the nature of self and what it really needs.

What about zazen?  Is it really possible to enjoy long periods of time sitting on a cushion and looking at a wall?  If my practice is driven by trying to satisfy the desires of the small self, possibly not, because every period will be taken up with the need to outshine other sangha members, have a peak experience, become someone I like better, or otherwise get some personal reward.  If my sitting is driven simply by my aspiration to sit, then there’s no question of meeting or not meeting a goal.  I can simply settle down into the ease and joy Dogen describes.

“Zazen is good for nothing” is Okumura Roshi’s famous translation of an expression (“beyond gain and beyond satori” mushotoku-mushogo 無所得 – 無所悟]) used frequently by his dharma grandfather, Kodo Sawaki.  This simple phrase is a distillation of the essence of shikantaza, and all of our dharma study comes back to “zazen is good for nothing” in some way.  Our problems begin when we follow our natural human tendency to look for meaning in our activities.  We usually don’t do anything, or enjoy anything, without knowing the point of that action, so it seems counterintuitive to engage in sitting just for its own sake and take delight in it just because it’s wholesome.  We can say “Zazen is good for nothing,” but we can also just stop at “Zazen is good.”  Good is good enough.  It doesn’t need anything else.  

Further reading and watching

• Zazen is good for nothing, Okumura Roshi's video interview
• The Taste of Thusness, Hoko's article on cooking for sesshin

Notes
(1) Kosho Uchiyama, “Uchiyama Roshi’s Teisho on Genjo koan,” Dogen’s Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries.  Counterpoint, 2013.  P. 194

Delight is a gate of Dharma illumination; for it is the mind of peace and tranquility.
歡喜是法明門、安穩心故。

Joy, happiness or delight—what a satisfying result for which to aim in our practice!  Surely practice can fix all the things that make us unhappy and point us toward a pure paradise where life is beautiful all the time.  Isn’t that what it means to liberate ourselves and all beings from suffering?

First, we need to ask ourselves what happiness is, exactly.  Having an abundance of chocolate cake or social media likes?  Getting rid of the noisy neighbors?  Knowing that we’ve paid our income taxes for this year and we don’t have to worry about them for another twelve months?

Indeed, if and when those things happen, we’ll probably feel pretty good—at least, for awhile.  But soon we’ll be off on a quest for the next thing that will bring delight when it either shows up in our lives or exits stage right.  Somehow, we always want things to be different from the way they are.  This, of course, is Buddha’s first and second noble truth: human life is charactized by the suffering that comes with chasing after things and running away from things.

So, from where does deep and sustainable delight really come, and how do we get our hands on it?  The good news is that it’s already here, if we know how to find it.  Practice is about knowing how to find delight here and now, not about getting better at acquiring things from somewhere else.

Being able to experience delight is a good indication that we’re also experiencing peace and tranquility.  The Sanskrit word at the basis of these elements means that the body and mind are at ease or at rest, and things are stable and safe.  It’s the opposite of agitation and anxiety.  We need to be tranquil in order to experience real delight.  Thrill-seeking might seem fun or rewarding for the moment, but doesn’t lead to lasting happiness.  Also, of course, if we’re agitated because we’re angry or fearful we can’t experience delight either.  We might characterize all of these things as disturbance.

Peace and tranquility is freedom from disturbance.  That doesn’t mean we remain perfectly still and silent all the time, or that we can’t dance or sing or cry or engage in whatever is happening in this moment.  It means we can do all of those things and yet not be disturbed.  When we’re not disturbed we have peace, and when we have peace, then delight can arise.

How do we keep from being disturbed?  We avoid grasping and judging.  As soon as I grab something, give it a name, decide whether it’s a good or bad thing for me, I have disturbance.  Can we encounter each thing as it is, engage with it appropriately and let go of it and move on?  If so, we can be delighted with whatever we’re doing and whatever circumstance we’re in.

Avoiding disturbance is not becoming inert or passive.  It’s not about separating ourselves from what’s happening or protecting our equanimity by being stand-off-ish.   We’re wholeheartedly entering into this moment and this reality, and everything that it presents.  We can be Jizo Bodhisattvas going into hell, and still we can stand up straight, and still delight can arise.

Balancing the cultivation of tranquility with the need to carry out our activities in the world—in other words, experiencing delight without disturbance—is a key point of practice at Sanshin.  It comes to us directly from Uchiyama Roshi’s life experience as a Japanese who was born at the beginning of the Taisho era (1912).  In the Tokugawa era (1600-1868), Japan was closed to outside influences, social classes were fixed, a centralized government held power, the size of the population was stable and there was little change. Fixed social classes meant that there was no competition or freedom of choice. A stable population required no advances in agriculture to feed a growing number of people. Without competition, there was peace of mind. Instead of going toward development and progress, energy went into refining the culture, increasing sophistication and elevating its aesthetics.

During the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan began to be influenced by Western ideas about organization and government as well as science and technology. It had to study and adopt these Western forms of progress so that it wouldn’t be left behind or swallowed up as a Western colony, but peace of mind was lost as a result.

Uchiyama Roshi witnessed the effects of this change, and this experience prompted his question: how do we find a balance between progress and peace of mind?  He considered how Japan was to integrate its serene traditional culture with more driven Western development. He studied Western philosophy and Christianity as well as Buddhism in an effort to come to an understanding, and he concluded that the bodhisattva path and working hard for all beings rather than oneself was the answer.  The exploration of this question of balance is the topic of his well-known book Opening the Hand of Thought.  

Progress can encourage competition, and the result of competition is a few winners and many losers. Winners have power and money and sit at the top of the pyramid. However, Uchiyama Roshi says that there are no real winners because achieving power and money leads to disturbance and suffering: fear of loss and no peace of mind.  If we turn our efforts to working for all beings’ benefit and development rather than competing for our own gain, we harness the energy of our discovery, innovation and building for the creation of wholesomeness and liberation from suffering.  We experience delight.

We live with a day-to-day tension between chasing after or escaping from things and avoiding taking any action at all in order to remain calm.  Uchiyama Roshi points out that this same tension exists in our practice of zazen.  While we’re aiming for nonthinking, we are usually wobbling between sleeping and thinking or, as Dogen puts it in the Fukanzazengi, dullness and distraction.  Shikantaza gives us the opportunity to put ourselves into the intersection of peace and progress and see what’s there.

We can do this not only during zazen but also in the midst of work and study.  One of my dharma teacher friends once asked her sangha to consider what makes up a skillful attitude toward work.  “If I can’t have fun vaccuuming,” she asked, ”when will I have fun?”  If we can just vaccuum without grumbling, delight can arise, and it’s not delight at having a clean carpet.  That kind of response is still based on attachment.  There’s no need to look for the silver lining or to make things OK, to convince ourselves of the virtues or qualities of our circumstances in order to justify our activity.  That’s just another place to get stuck.

The term translated as delight in the gate statement is 歓喜 kanki.  Both kanji mean joy or delight.  A related term is 随喜 zuiki, the delight of participating in practice.  随 Zui means through or during, so the feeling of this term is delight while engaged in something.  It comes from Chapter 18 of the Lotus Sutra, “The Merit of Appropriate Joy.”  This section describes various incidences of someone hearing the dharma, experiencing delight, and then sharing the dharma with others: the delight of participating in practice.

Traditionally, there are four ways to engage with the dharma: hearing, teaching, reading and reciting or chanting.  When we hear the dharma and start to practice, we can begin  to see how we create suffering in ourselves and others with our greed, anger and ignorance, and over time we may get better at heading off this kind of disturbance.  We may become more peaceful and tranquil, and more likely to respond to dharma practice by experiencing delight.  Whether we’re hearing a talk, helping others with their practice, reading a dharma book or participating in a service, delight can arise naturally.

When there’s a lot of static in our lives, it’s harder to take in the teachings and really be aware of what’s happening in our bodies and minds.  On the other hand, when we aren’t agitated, the dharma can get in, it can help us calm down and experience delight, we can practice, and continue to take in more dharma.  The more dharma, the more delight!

This delight is not about our personal happiness, so we’re able to take it into the world for the benefit of others.  For instance, in Dogen Zenji’s Tenzo Kyokun, we find, “When tenzos are engaged in cooking, although they encounter coarse [ingredients] they should not arouse negligence; although they encounter delicacies they should be all the more diligent.  Therefore, to fulfill these duties for one day and one night is to delight in participating in practice.” (1)  To not judge ingredients, to have equanimity while working in the kitchen or anywhere in our lives, is to delight in participating in practice and to be able to benefit others.

Okumura Roshi explains this unselfish delight in Chapter 1 of Living by Vow when he writes about the informal meal chant: “As we take food and drink, I vow with all beings to rejoice in zazen, being filled with delight in the dharma.”  In Japanese, we say Nyaku onjiki ji tougan shujou, zennetsu ijiki houki juman.  Delight in the dharma is houki (法喜), literally dharma delight.  Yup, it’s the same ki as kanki and zuiki.

Okumura Roshi wrotes, “When we eat, we should be happy.  This happiness is the enjoyment of dharma.  We consider the taste of food to be the taste of dharma.  When we receive or eat a meal, we shouldn’t grasp the taste.  Usually when we eat, we encounter our food with our desires.  These desires are the cause of delusion or samsara.  The Buddha and Dogen Zenji teach us to become free from desires caused by objects.  This is Dogen’s teaching of shinjin datsuraku, or dropping off body and mind.  Our joy when we receive food is not the fulfillment of our desire.  It is the joy of dharma and zazen.  I think this is the most essential teaching about food and eating.” (2)

In zazen we just observe our desires and delusions coming up without acting on them.  It’s a great chance to create the conditions for delight to arise because the heart and mind settle down.  A genuine selfless delight is an indication of some degree of tranquility and an encouragement to our practice—thus it becomes a gate of dharma illumination.

Pure Mind is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] there is no defilement.
淨心是法明門、無濁穢故。

In the last gate we considered the role of faith in our practice.  In fact, faith is one of the elements that purifies the mind.  Okumura Roshi explains that in the Abhidharmakośa, one word for faith is 心澄淨, shin chojo, the heart/mind that is pure or clear.  “According to that text, shin [heart/mind] is like a jewel. It’s said that in India when monks travelled and had to drink water from rivers or ponds— I don’t know if this is true or not— there were certain jewels which when put in the muddy water, settled the mud down and then the surface of the water became pure. This mud is our doubt or delusions. If there is faith, our delusions or our doubts go down and our life becomes clear and pure, and we can drink.  Faith is not a belief in some kind of a system of belief or a doctrine we have to accept, like in many religions. Faith is something which makes our minds pure and clear.” (1) 

This gate introduces two very important words in the Buddhist tradition: pure and mind.  淨 is clean or pure, with a connotation of being untainted or undefiled.  心 is mind, but not the usual intellectual mind that functions in the brain.  Both of these words have several important layers of meaning.

First we need to understand what purity is, and we need to understand it from the perspective of both the concrete world of our human practice and the world of emptiness.  In general, defilement is what happens when we don’t see the universe clearly and we take action based on greed, anger and ignorance that creates suffering for ourselves and others.  On the other hand, we cultivate purity when we’re guided by wisdom and let go of our delusions and attachments.  Our tradition includes things like the Three Pure Precepts and the Pure Standards for the Zen Community.  These are guidelines for behavior that move us toward being in the world in a way that’s based on letting go of clinging, treating others with benevolence, and seeing clearly that the universe is characterized by interconnectedness, impermanence, and the lack of a fixed and independent self-nature.

We can see that purity can be found in the everyday things and situations we encounter.  We don’t need to go somewhere else and leave the dusty world behind in search of a paradise.  Simply letting go of the three poisons here and now is itself purity.  Some practitioners have the idea that money, for instance, is tainted and if the dharma center is concerned with it then somehow the practice is defiled.  Money itself is neither pure nor defiled, but our response to and relationship with money can certainly be a problem if we greet and treat it with craving or aversion.  The same is true, of course, for anything: alcohol, sex, technology, power, or other items that bring up strong feelings.  These encounters give us important opportunities to observe our habituated thinking and do some discernment about how the three poisons arise, lead to delusion and defilement, and perpetuate suffering.

Purity from the perspective of emptiness, on the other hand, is not about individual objects or circumstances.  In the world of the absolute, there is only this one unified reality, and nothing can step outside of it and be separate.  If everything is interconnected, then there’s no way to separate things that are pure from things that are defiled.  This is going beyond purity and defilement, or wholesomeness or unwholesomeness, or good and bad.  Much as we may not want this or that element in our lives, as beings who live in this one unified reality, there’s no escaping from things we don’t like.  If we see with the eyes of Buddha, there’s no way to cut ourselves off from anything or, indeed, to make any distinction between good and bad or like and dislike.

It can be easy to decide that this is where we really want to live: in a place where everything is always OK and we don’t need to do anything because there’s no defilement—but that doesn’t mean that there’s no suffering.  The first noble truth says that life is characteized by suffering.  That means that as bodhisattvas, we can’t ignore the dusty world and our vow to liberate beings, and live only for ourselves in paradise.  Falling into either the world of form or the world of emptiness is seeing only part of the story of reality.

You may know about the well-known image of the pure lotus that blooms in muddy water.  Although the lovely flower lifts itself up to bloom at the surface of the pond, its roots are deep in the mud.  It’s an image of the Buddha, who overcame the delusions of the world but continued to exist in the world without being defiled himself.  It’s an example for us as we carry out our daily activities with wisdom and compassion.  No task or object is itself unclean if we can do that task or handle that object with a skillful attitude.

Now we have to take a look at Mind.   There’s no one word in English that serves as a good translation for 心 shin (Ch. xin), so it’s often called the heart-mind.  When the Chinese began translating sutras from Sanskrit, they used xin for Sanskrit terms like citta, manas, and vijnana.  All of these refer to various consciousnesses in the Yogacara tradition, from which Zen can be said to descend, and in that way xin/shin takes on a psychological association.  However, xin/shin was also used for the Sanskrit hrdaya, which can mean heart, center, or essence.   Xin/shin as citta is in the realm of subject and object and making distinctions, while xin/shin as hrdaya means all dharmas in this one unified reality.    No wonder we have some confusion over what exactly our ancestors are talking about.

Mind is not a “thing” that can be grasped or completely and accurately described because as soon as one conceives of it, one is dealing with a copy of Mind itself.  Mind is the action of experiencing this moment in the most simple, direct, pure and authentic way, completely without the covering of the individual perspective and before the personal thinking apparatus begins to color and shape that experience.  Mind has no starting point or frame of reference—it’s living in the highest degree of non-attachment. As Dogen described it in Shobogenzo Bukkyo, it’s the characters of the sutra without the paper on which they’re written.

Uchiyama Roshi explained that “mind” in the context of the dharma should be understood as “the mind that has been directly transmitted from buddha to buddha [and which] extends throughout all phenomena, and [thus] all phenomena are inseparable from that mind.  My personal life experience is at the same time the world of reality.  Conversely, the world of reality constitutes my mind.  Hence, the use of the word ‘mind’ in this case goes far beyond having only a mental or psychological meaning.  In our age, perhaps ‘pure life’ would be a clearer expression than mind.  In the daily course of things I encounter a world of phenomena, and it is through those encounters and my experience of them that I live out my life.” (2)  We can see how mind in this context encompasses the functioning of the entire universe in this moment.  We use the psychological mind to make sense of what’s coming in through the six sense gates, but we don’t get tangled up in the idea that there are separate elements “out there” living a life unconnected to our own.  The reality of life experience is just one thing and can’t be divided, even though it contains myriad objects.

Uchiyama Roshi’s “pure life” and our gate statement’s “pure Mind” are two ways of expressing the same thing.  The universe functions as it functions, without hindrance, and we see it clearly, both from the point of view of individual elements with characteristics and the point of view of emptiness and going beyond distinction.

When Dogen wrote about the mind in Shobogenzo Sokushinzebutsu (The Mind Itself is Buddha), he wrote about shin as hrdaya.  “The mind that has been correctly transmitted is the one mind… and all dharmas are one mind. The mind is mountains, rivers, and the great earth; the sun, the moon, and stars.”  Clearly, this is not about the small, personal, psychological mind.  It’s about the essential interconnectedness of all dharmas, with nothing left out and nothing arising and existing on its own.

If there is nothing outside of this one unified reality, and the nature of dharmas is to be interpenetrated, then our usual ideas about purity and defilement don’t hold water.  One thing cannot be separated into good and bad, tainted and stainless, pure and defiled.  There can be neither a pure mind nor an impure mind.  Yet, since the earliest days of Buddhist practice, teachers have been urging us to remove mental defilements and instructing us in how to do it.  What’s going on?

In the Simile of the Cloth, the Buddha explained that a human mind tainted with defilements was unable to fully assimilate his teachings and realize the larger pure Mind.  He used the illustration of someone dying cloth, asking his monks what would happen if the cloth was stained and dirty as opposed to clean and bright.  Of course, the dirty cloth would take the dye badly and be impure in color, while the clean cloth would take the dye well and be pure in color. (3)  Engaging in our concrete practices of zazen, work and study helps us to unwind ourselves from the three poisons and the delusion and unwholesomeness that follow.  We’re ready to settle down to hear and assimilate dharma teachings and deeply understand the nature of the pure Mind of emptiness.

Notes
(1) "The Pure Water of Faith," article by Shohaku Okumura for the Dogen Institute, 2020  
(2) How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment, Kosho Uchiyama, Shambala, 2005.  p. 27-28
(3) Vatthupama Sutta: The Simile of the Cloth translated from the Pali by Nyanaponika Thera.  1998

Further reading:

• The Zen Teaching of Huang Po: On the Transmission of Mind, translated by John Blofield.  Grove Press, 1994.

Right belief is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] the steadfast mind is not broken.
正信是法明門、不破堅牢心故。

Practitioners in North America may have some discomfort with the very first words in the very first gate: right belief.  I don’t want someone telling me what to believe, or judging whether or not what I believe is right.  I came to Buddhism because I heard that we’re supposed to try out the teachings for ourselves before deciding whether or not they were true.  I’ll think for myself, thank you very much.  My steadfast mind is my own business.

“Belief” here is sometimes translated “faith,” a word which might be just as problematic.  Fortunately, this gate statement is not directing us to blindly accept the doctrine of a tradition or to give up the practice of inquiring into the dharma.  In fact, it’s encouraging us to do just the opposite and it’s pointing us to a specific text and teaching.  In this case, faith is not accepting something that cannot be proved or experienced.  It’s having enough interest and confidence in the Three Treasures—Buddha, dharma and sangha—to investigate further, begin to practice, and see what happens.

After all, even though our Zen ancestors and teachers point out that buddha nature or awakening are already here, we still fall prey to the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance.  We still create suffering for ourselves because of craving and aversion.  We still think we can solve our problems with a suitable application of chocolate cake or physical perfection or public acclaim.  It’s a pretty big stretch to accept for a few moments that there is no independent, fixed “self” that needs these things to survive, and that real contentment lies elsewhere.  If I think chocolate cake is my lifeline, letting go of it is a risk.  I need at least some assurance that the risk is worth it.

Interestingly, faith and awakening move in a circle.  If I can muster up enough faith to give Zen practice a try, my experience bolsters my faith, which bolsters my practice, and so on.  When I prime the pump and set activity in motion, practice takes over and I can fold into the universe as it does what it does, not losing my individuality but seeing through and beyond it.

This is the point of a very important sixth-century Chinese text called the Dasheng qixin lun (大乘起信論), or the Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith, by Asvagosa.  This text has been a major influence on East Asian philosophy and religion through the years, including the Huayuan and Chan/Zen schools as well as Tientai and Pure Land.  It discusses how beginning practitioners, or those not yet committed to Mahayana Buddhism, can get a foothold and cultivate the faith necessary for becoming a bodhisattva.

Early Buddhism lays out ten stages in the journey to bodhisattvahood, and the Awakening of Faith is designed to put new practitioners on that path.  Embarking on it takes enough belief or faith to take the first faltering steps, but once the newcomer begins to practice, faith is gradually replaced with personal experience and knowledge.  What began as a story or concept of the dharma becomes one’s own belief based on one’s own verification.  Having verified the initial hypothesis, if you will, the baby bodhisattva arouses the aspiration to continue on the path to practice and liberate all beings.

The Awakening of Faith opens with a lovely prayer of homage, which reads in part, “I wish to have sentient beings / Eliminate doubts and abandon wrongly-held views / And give rise to correct Mahāyāna faith, / Leaving the buddha-lineage uninterrupted.”  It seems we need to consider right belief or correct faith from two perspectives: resolving our doubts about the value of teachings and practice, and seeing through our delusions about what the self is and how the universe operates.

In helping us make a start on the first perspective, Asvagosa sets out four kinds of commitment to faith related to suchness plus the Three Treasures.  First, he says, we have faith in the most basic reality, that of suchness or emptiness, and we take pleasure in being mindful of it.  Next we are mindful of the Buddha’s many virtues; we make offerings to him and try to emulate his practice and good qualities.  Our third faith is that the dharma is wholesome, and we verify that by cultivating the six perfections, or paramitas—generosity, morality, patience, diligence, concentration, and wisdom.  Finally we have faith that the sangha is able to practice as a healthy and meaningful community because we spend time in the midst of it, learning about practice that accords with reality.

We can see that the right belief we encounter in our gate statement has nothing to do with abandoning our personal discernment.  On the contrary, according to Asvagosa, the way to reinforce faith and ease our doubts is to have our own moment by moment direct encounters with reality, Buddha, dharma and sangha.  This leads us to the second perspective mentioned above: a deep understanding of the true nature of the self.  “True” is important here, because it is to this that the “right” in “right belief” is pointing.  正 can be translated as right, correct, true or upright, among other meanings.  Thus the statement is not setting up a competition between “right” and “wrong.”  It’s distinguishing between belief based on ignorance and delusion and belief based on an understanding and experience of true reality.   

In brief, if we look closely at the nature of self, we will see that there is nothing there that’s fixed or independent, nothing that we can grasp and hang onto.  If we think otherwise, that’s delusion.  In fact, not understanding no-self is one of the most basic delusions we have, and it’s at the root of a lot of our suffering.  If I think this self is permanent and unchanging, I need to make sure it’s as good as or better than all the other selves around, and this fiction of a self becomes a yardstick for measuring my life ­—but that makes no sense, because there really is no yardstick and nothing to measure.  When I deeply see the interdependent and impermanent nature of this thing called “me,” I can loosen my attachment to it, and my need to defend it at others’ expense begins to diminish.  (We’ll look more closely at the true nature of the self at Gate 20: Reflection on there being no self.) 

Next. let’s turn to the second part of the gate statement and the steadfast mind that is not broken.  堅牢心 is the mind that is firm and stable, like the earth.  We need to understand that this is not a mind that is inflexible and closed, or which feels the need to hold its ground against all opposing opinions, but one that functions with equanimity and settledness.  When new information or insights arise, the steadfast mind is happy to consider and accommodate them, adjusting its worldview toward an ever-sharpening awareness of what’s actually going on.  It maintains its stability because it knows what its underlying beliefs are and from where they come.  This is one of the five elements of spiritual health. (2)

不破, not broken, can also mean not disproved or negated.  With our right faith established, our doubts and delusions may occasionally assail us in our practice and cause us to step back and do some discernment, but they can’t completely negate our own experience of the dharma.  Once we begin to see this one unified reality, we can’t not see it.  Once we know something about universal functioning from our own experience, we can’t not know it.  We can’t regress to the kind of ignorance we had when we first stood on the threshold of practice, even if we may forget sometimes to practice what the Buddha taught.  

Right belief or correct faith makes it possible for us all to realize awakening even if we’re not scholars of Buddhism or mystical monks.  In the Bendowa, Dogen cites three stories of people who were afflicted with various kinds of hindrances but manifested awakening anyway because of their right belief.  In the first instance, the story goes that Buddha’s order included both a stupid old monk and a young monk who wanted to play a trick on him.  The youngster led the old monk into a dark room and hit him with a ball, saying, “You have got the first effect” (stream-entry).  Again he hit the old monk with a ball and said, “You have got the second effect” (being subject to returning only once more).  The third time he said, “You have got the third effect” (not being subject to returning at all), and finally, with the fourth ball, he said “You have got the fourth effect” (arhatship).  Because of the old monk’s belief in anuttara samyak sambodhi, unsurpassed perfect awakening, he emerged from the darkened room having actually experienced the fourth effect and attained nirvana.  The joke was on the youngster! (1)  In Shobogenzo Arakan, Dogen writes, "[T]hose who have faith in unsurpassable complete awakening are arhats.  'Definitely believing in this Dharma' means 'conferring this Dharma,' 'singularly transmitting this Dharma,' and 'practicing and verifying this Dharma.'" (3)

The second story to which Dogen refers in the Bendowa is that of a courtesan who put on a nun’s robe as a joke.  He tells the story fully in Shobogenzo Kesa Kudoku.  The nun Utpalavarna recalls that in a past life she was a vain and greedy courtesan, and when she died she fell into hell as a result of her unwholesome ways.  However, in that lifetime she once put on an okesa as a joke, and on the merit of that alone she eventually achieved awakening in a subsequent rebirth.  "Now the Bhiksuni Utpalavarna put on kashāya simply for the sake of entertainment; still she had attained the Way within her third lifetime.  Much more, having aroused the pure heart of faith for the sake of unsurpassable awakening, if we wear kashāya, {or okesa} this virtue will be completed without failure." (4)

Of these first two characters, Dogen writes, “[B]oth were dull people, stupid and silly creatures. But aided by right belief, they had the means to escape their delusion.”  

Finally, Dogen’s third story is about a devout woman who prepared and offered food to a rather dull monk, expecting to hear a dharma teaching in return.  The monk, however, could think of nothing to say and ran away.  Nonetheless, she experienced awakening thanks to her belief.  She found the monk and thanked him, upon which he himself was awakened.  “This did not derive from her wisdom, did not derive from writings, did not depend on words, and did not depend on talk; she was aided only by her right belief.”

Dogen goes on to make the point that Shakyamuni’s teachings have spread far and wide, and had awakening required that all hearers possess intelligence, wisdom and clarity, with no element of right belief, this could not have happened.  “When people just practice with right belief, the clever and the stupid alike will attain the truth. Just because our country is not a nation of benevolence or wisdom and the people are dullwitted, do not think that it is impossible for us to grasp the Buddha-Dharma.”

Faith is the on-ramp for new practitioners and it keeps the established ones moving forward.  Sanghas need to offer ways for beginners to cultivate enough faith to establish their practice, especially since long periods of zazen and intensive sesshin can seem daunting.  Okumura Roshi recalls, "Once Uchiyama Roshi criticized the way some Pure-land Buddhist teachers preached to their believers. He said that their teachings are wonderful but what they say was meaningful only to the people who already have a deep faith in Pure-land Buddhist teachings. They don’t discuss how people who have no faith in Buddhism yet can understand and attain the same faith in that teaching of Amitabha’s power of vow to save all living beings and accept them to his Pure-land. Uchiyama Roshi said it was like a lofty building from the second floor but without a stairway to get to the second floor from the first floor." (5) Right belief helps us climb and keep on climbing.

Notes
(1) All stories referred to here are from Volume 1 of the Shobogenzo translated by Nishijima and Cross, p. 20.
(2)  The other four are a balance between or integration of individual and universe, or self and whole; a feeling of hope or optimism that one is capable of getting through tough times and an understanding of where to turn for help; an underlying sense of peace and wellbeing; and a sense of purpose in life and that life has meaning.
(3) Shohaku Okumura's unpublished translation of Shobogenzo Arakan, 2017
(4) Shohaku Okumura's unpublished translation of Shobogenzo Kesa Kudoku, 2006
(5) From Sanshin's January 2003 newsletter, reproduced at Cuke.com.
​
Further reading and listening:

• The Pure Water of Faith, article by Shohaku Okumura for the Dogen Institute, 2020
• Treatise on Awakening Mahayana Faith, translated by John Jorgensen, Dan Lusthaus, John Makeham, Mark Strange.  Oxford University Press; Annotated edition,  2019
• The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, translated by Shohaku Okumura and Taigen Leighton.  Tuttle Publishing, 2011
• Shohaku Okumura's recorded lectures on Shobogenzo Bendowa