The faculty of balance is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] the mind is pure.
定 是法明門、心淨故。 

The translation I’m using here says balance, but this fourth faculty is more commonly called concentration or meditation.  Nonetheless, balance is an important theme.  It’s about the settledness and mental equanimity that comes with the attention being perfectly focused.  Traditionally, it’s the evenmindedness that comes when we can accept both pleasant and unpleasant sensations for what they are, and can meet whatever is coming at us in a solid and stable way.

Concentration is what keeps us single-minded, if you will.  In early practice, keeping the mind focused on an  object of meditation was what allowed transcendent wisdom to arise.  Throughout, there is a sense of nonseparation of mind and object, or unifying subject and object.  In general, it’s about keeping the mind from wandering around, and it requires a certain amount of training.  The more we settle, the better we’re able to concentrate, and the more settled and balanced we become, and the cycle goes on.

Concentration was an antidote to the distraction of the five objects of enjoyment—in other words, what’s coming in through five senses of the body.  Instead, one concentrated on the true nature of reality.  In the Pali canon, it says that only someone who can “withstand the impact of the senses” can develop concentration.

If we think about what the word concentrate means in English, it’s to bring something to the center.  One meaning is to remove impurities or extra material so that we’re left with only the element we want, like removing water from juice so we can freeze and store it, or creating a highly concentrated laundry soap or perfume.  Buddha describes the process of refining gold; the goldsmith removes each kind of impurity from coarse sand to fine dust so that he ends up with a substance he can work.  If he doesn’t, the gold is brittle, not strong or flexible enough to make anything or “withstand impact.”

In the same way, he says, we need to get rid of the major hindrances and impulses toward misconduct, and then the moderate ones and more minor ones as we’re better and better able able to concentrate.  Driving out hindrances allows for settling and concentrating, and settling and concentrating allow for driving out more and more subtle hindrances.  However, we have to be careful about what we’re concentrating on.  Singlemindedness is not in itself necessarily wholesome.  If we’re fixated on satisfying our cravings and aversions, that’s concentration that’s loaded with hindrances.  Thus we’re talking about skillful concentration here.

At first, Buddha says, our concentration happens because we force ourselves into it.  We’re forceably keeping ourselves from wandering off.  It takes a lot of intentional restraint to stay focused, but once we’re not being pulled around by our delusion and hindrances, we can settle and concentrate naturally without force.

In the early teachings we hear a lot about meditative absorption and various stages of absorption.  What does that mean?  It’s actually a way of experiencing non-separation.  There were exercises designed to help the practitioner concentrate on a specific quality of an object so completely that it filled their awareness, and the awareness expanded to include the object in its entirety.  Concentration on one thing was not to the exclusion of the broader reality but a gateway to the broader reality.  It’s this broader or expanded awareness that allows for the emergence of balance or equanimity.  One image is that the mind becomes steady like the flame of a lamp in the absence of wind.  It’s not wandering around and it’s also not being pushed around by hindrances.

One reason that concentration is important is impermanence.  Everything is changing all the time, including conditions of mind.  What we’re thinking about, how we’re feeling, what we’re perceiving—all are in a constant state of flux.  There’s also more than one thing arising at a time.  For our own mental health, we need some kind of continuity of attention and processing.  However, there’s more than one kind of concentration.  There’s the intellectual concentration we use for studying or solving a problem, inventing or building something, or running an experiment.  It’s really an activity of the psychological mind only.

Concentration in practice needs the body, the emotions, our aspiration, our whole experience of this moment.  We take the posture as a part of our practice to support our focus, so we need to be paying attention to what we’re doing with body.  We live by precepts so that what we’re doing with our concentration is ethical and wholesome.

We take a broader perspective in our concentration that just the sensory world.  Our awareness includes both form and emptiness, and when we see that samsara and nirvana are both right here, there’s a better chance of us finding contentment in this moment.  The objects of our grasping and craving lose some of their seductive qualities.

Sometimes concentration is referred to as samadhi.  That can mean focusing our attention on one object, but in the Soto Zen tradition, it can mean to see and hold all things equally, or that mind and environment are one, or actor and action are one.  Dogen Zenji was not a big fan of the Theravada view of concentration, as we’ll see in a minute.

Of course, there’s a huge connection between concentration and our zazen.  The shikan in shikantaza means “just.”  When we sit, we just sit.  Sitting isn’t a time to ponder challenges in our practice or ruminate on the latest dharma book we read.  We do only four things in our zazen: take the posture, keep the eyes open, breathe through the nose, and let go of thought.  Anything else is extra.  We’re refining the gold and removing the extra stuff so that what we’re left with is something workable.  That takes concentration, but not the psychological kind.

Uchiyama Roshi says: When we think of mind in its ordinary use, we usually think of the psychological mind or conscious awareness.  In Sanskrit, mind used in this sense is referred to as citta, in which case the expression shin ikkyosho would mean to gather our confused mind together and concentrate on one thing.  By definition, zazen would become some sort of exercise in mental or psychic concentration, or a method for training the mind to attain a state whereby all of one’s ideas or thoughts about some object would disappear, leaving the person completely unperturbed.  This is the superficial implication of munen muso, no notion, no thought.  Zazen of the Theravada teachings and of the non-Buddhist teachings are of this type of psychic concentration.  Any method of psychic concentration works from the assumption that our mind is always in disorder and aims to still it by doing zazen.  Dogen Zenji, however, never taught that zazen was merely a method of working to improve yourself, not a simplistic straightening out of your own life with no concern for those around you.  Dogen once said: “Even if you have the mind of a wily fox, do not practice the Theravada way of trying only to improve yourself!” (1)  

Concentration is one of the three kinds of elements (prajna/wisdom, sila/ethics and samadhi/concentration) on the eightfold path, making it central to Buddhist practice.  Sometimes these are called the three basic studies.  Uchiyama Roshi describes the samadhi category simply as settling down in quietness.  The three elements that fall into this third category are right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration or right meditation.  It’s easy to get confused about the relationship between zazen and concentration; when texts are translated this way, sounds like they’re same thing.  However, Dogen says Do not consider zazen to be the concentration and meditation of the three basic studies. (2)

Uchiyama Roshi explains this comment: According to common sense, meditation or concentration is considered to be a means to calm down one’s mind, the thoughts—including emotions—produced in our brain.  Since thoughts make noise and cause is to worry about one thing or another, we try to calm down.  In other words, we try to bring our thoughts under the control of thought itself.  This practice takes place on the ground of our thoughts.

When we’re feeling agitated and unable to focus, it might seem like we should tell ourselves to concentrate on what we’re doing so we can calm down, but Uchiyama Roshi is saying the opposite: he says we can’t calm our minds with our minds—it’s like trying to pull up the mat we’re sitting on.  Thus concentration isn’t about control or forcing our minds into some kind of activity or state, and it’s not about getting our thinking to stop by driving out thoughts.

The second part of this gate is indeed about mind, so we have to understand what kind of mind we’re talking about here.  Uchiyama Roshi says: Mind as the directly transmitted buddhadharma is used in the sense of mind extending throughout all things, and of all things being included within mind.  When we speak of a zazen based on the innate oneness of mind and environment, it should not be understood that zazen is a method of psychic concentration or of trying to still one’s mind. (3) 

Let’s take a moment here to consider mind and what the gate statement means when it says the mind is pure.  Mind here is not the everyday thinking mind of the individual, psychological function that arises from the collection of five skandhas.  Historically, conflating Mind with the operations of the brain led to the argument that practice isn’t necessary because we (our thinking minds) are already awakened.  Dogen’s question about this teaching was: if we’re already awakened, why do we have to practice?  This led him to China and his teacher Tendo Nyojo in search of an answer.  Eventually he realized that practice and awakening are not two and are not separate from Mind.  This became one of the major themes of his writing.  

The individual and his/her/their activities are certainly not outside of this one unified reality.  The psychological operation is not separate from the total dynamic functioning of the universe, but this isn’t Mind within the Soto Zen tradition.  Mind is also not a “thing” that we can grasp or completely and accurately describe, because as soon as we conceive of it, we’re 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 integrating the individual self and the universal self without a starting point or fixed point of view, before the personal thinking apparatus begins to color and shape that experience by itself.  Mind has no starting point, frame of reference or object.  It’s living in the highest degree of non-attachment.  In the “Bukkyo” fascicle of the Shobogenzo, Dogen described it as the  characters of the sutra without the paper on which they’re written.

When he translated the “Sokushin-zebutsu” ("Mind Itself is Buddha") fascicle, Okumura Roshi used the term  “to actualize sokushin-zebutsu.”  In Japanese it’s literally “to do sokushin-zebutsu.”  He says that when a person penetrates sokushin-zebutsu, the person and sokushin-zebutsu are both something happening.  At that point, saying “Mind and mind” or “buddha and practice” as different things doesn’t make sense.  That’s in line with Dogen frequently telling us to have a spirit of undividedness in each situation, and to work wholeheartedly or put undivided attention into the work.  That includes seeing what each circumstance calls for, and that’s concentration: seeing beyond small self to include all of reality and not being separate from that reality.

Shikantaza is just sitting with nothing extra, including an individual or personal point of view.  Uchiyama Roshi wrote that sitting in order to gain control of our minds, get rid of craving or delusion, and reach Nirvana is not the pure zazen of life itself.  That can feel like concentration, but we’re not doing it with the pure mind of this gate statement.  It’s flavored or colored with various kinds of profit or gain. (4)  On the other hand, shikantaza in which we let go of thought, and the perspective only of the small self, is the kind of mind we’ve been talkng about here.  The same descriptions we’ve used for Mind apply to shikantaza: the activity of experiencing this moment in the most simple, direct, pure and authentic way, completely integrating the individual self and the universal self without a starting point or fixed point of view, before the personal thinking apparatus begins to color and shape that experience by itself.  That’s why Sawaki Roshi teaches about sitting zazen beyond gain and beyond satori, translated by Okumura Roshi as “good for nothing.”

According to this gate statement, when we concentrate—in other words, when we doing whatever we’re doing with nothing extra—then we have balance and our experience of reality is direct and complete.  We see both ourselves and others.  We have both wisdom and compassion.  We have a direction and we’re also able to adapt.

Earlier I mentioned doing the four elements of zazen with nothing extra, and just now I noted that this was one manifestation of concentration.  However, we can practice concentration in whatever we’re doing by letting go of whatever is extra.  That means having some idea about what’s happening that keeps us from experiencing what’s really happening.  If I’m having a conversation with you, I can concentrate by listening carefully to what you’re really saying and not what I expect you to say or what I think you should say.  I can see who you really are and not who I think you are.  I can stop trying to be somebody in my response to you and instead let wisdom and compassion that are already there come out.  All that stuff is extra, and it’s taking up space.

Again, concentration is bringing something to the center rather than the attention wandering around.  When I notice my attention is sliding over to “What impressive thing can I say when he stops talking?” I can see that clearly and choose to let go of it and return to the actual conversation.  I’m not concentrating on whatever is at the center to the exclusion of some other part of my experience.  I have to be aware of what’s happening in this body and mind and not disregard that; at the same time, I have to be aware of what’s happening in the external world.

We might say that concentration is about refining our practice.  We become more and more aware of subtleties; that might be subtleties of what’s going on in the body while we’re sitting zazen, or it might be the little places where we get stuck in three poisons.  It might be the assumptions we’re making about who we are and the effects of what we do.  For instance, in the beginning of our precept practice we’re working at a pretty gross level: don’t kill people and take their stuff.  Then we start seeing more subtle ways in which we break precepts and contribute to unwholesomeness.  We see that anything can be an intoxicant, not just alcohol.  We see that not feeling anger and not indulging anger aren’t same.  We see that not slandering the three treasures is the same as zazen is good for nothing.

You may know that the original title for Uchiyama Roshi’s commentary on the Tenzo Kyokun was Refining Your Life.  It’s interesting to consider what that means: refining your life or concentrating your life into a pure form.  It really sounds like nothing extra, including nothing in our lives that pulls us off the path, feeds our hindrances or delusions, or clouds our vision.  Living a refined life in this case isn’t about being an elite, having the refinement of an expensive education or charm school etiquette or something.  I think it would be about making careful, intentional choices about what our lives include and what activities we’re doing.

Uchiyama Roshi actually equates refining your life with bodhicitta, the aspiration to practice and manifest awakening.  The Japanese term for bodicitta is doushin 道心, or way-seeking mind.  He says doushin means the aspiration to live the most refined life of the Self in every moment.  The bodhisattva vows are the same as living a concentrated or pure life of nothing extra.

Now, of course there’s another way to look at nothing extra.  Because of interconnectedness, there really is nothing extra.  There already can’t be anything extra or outside because there’s no separation.  In that sense, living a refined life of nothing extra is simply to see with the eyes of Buddha, to see that there is inside and outside and also to see that from the beginning there is no inside or outside.  Zazen with nothing extra is just doing the four activities with this particular body and mind and nothing else, but it’s also zazen that drops off body and mind so there’s no inside and outside.  Then we don’t need to try to concentrate on something in our zazen because there is already only one unified reality.

There’s kind of refinement or concentration that recognizes impurities, hindrances or delusions, and removes them.  There’s also the kind of refinement or concentration that sees that there never were any impurities to begin with.  Both of these views are true, and we have to attend to both of them.

Notes:
​(1)  Uchiyama, K.  (2005). How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment. United States: Shambhala, p. 25.
(2) Both references in this paragraph are from The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. (2011). United States: Tuttle Publishing.  The first is p. 158 and the second is p. 29.
​(3) How to Cook Your Life, p. 26 
(4) See Uchiyama, K. (1973). Approach to Zen: The Reality of Zazen/Modern Civilization and Zen. Japan: Japan Publications, p. 70.

The faculty of mindfulness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for[with it] we thoroughly perform many kinds of work.
念根是法明門、善作業故。

“Faculty” here is in the sense of an inherent physical or mental power, as in being in full possession of our faculties.  From pre-Buddhist Sanskrit through the Chinese, there’s a feeling of something being created or growing from a root, so it makes sense that these would be factors of bodhi, or things that lead to awakening.

Interestingly, sometimes the same word was used for the senses.  The understanding was not that the senses are just there passively receiving stimuli, but that there was energy being expended to collect these stimuli and then something was created from them.  These faculties might be inherent, but they’re active.

These five faculties start with belief and build on each other until they lead to wisdom, so in the beginning we take things on trust and by the end we see and understand for ourselves with our own insight.  We’ve looked at belief and effort; this time it’s mindfulness.  We noted that it’s possible to overdo both belief and effort.  According to the early teachings, it’s not possible to overdo mindfulness; our mindfulness should always be strong because it protects the mind from both too much activity and not enough, or both exertion and restraint.  It’s the middle way, just like we walk the line between thinking and sleeping in our zazen.

Mindfulness in early texts is about getting to a calm place in the mind or heart and then protecting that space.  It sometimes feels like there are several layers in our minds: one is peaceful and balanced and steady. and on top of that is a layer of agitation and restlessness.  As we saw at Gate 52, the Mahasatipatthana-sutra is a main source text for mindfulness practice in the early Buddhist tradition.  It shows us how to methodically cultivate the ability to pay continuous attention to our experience of whatever is happening in this moment, usually so that we can see where our delusion is and work on letting go of it.  

On a day to day basis we might be so caught up in busyness, delusion and discursive thinking that we can hardly believe there’s any calm in here at all.  We certainly don’t feel it very often.  That’s because we’re not actually attending to what’s here and now, but instead getting pulled around by craving and aversion.  The Pali canon says (and sati here is mindfulness or awareness):
And what is the faculty of mindfulness? There is the case where a disciple of the noble ones is mindful, is endowed with excellent proficiency in mindfulness, remembering & recollecting what was done and said a long time ago. He remains focused on the body in & of itself — ardent, alert, & having sati — subduing greed & distress with reference to the world. He remains focused on feelings in & of themselves... the mind in & of itself... mental qualities in & of themselves — ardent, alert, & having sati — subduing greed & distress with reference to the world. This is called the faculty of mindfulness. [SN 29-30]  

There were said to be four things that keep us from being in that quiet place: the senses, desires, movement of the body and discursive thinking.  Those things are elements of our everyday lives, and they’re necessary, but the problems start when they run wild and then the five skandhas grab onto them and decide that there’s a “me” that’s doing these things.  Thus earlt practitioners were told to withdraw the senses from their various objects, to pay attention to bodily movement, to stop wanting things in ways that shore up a sense of self, and to cut off discursive thinking.  Mindfulness was about maintaining this kind of isolation and protecting that space of calm and quiet by putting a boundary around it and making sure no trespassers get in by paying close attention.

The Pali canon says:  
Just as a royal frontier fortress has a wise, experienced, intelligent gatekeeper to keep out those he doesn’t know and to let in those he does, for the protection of those within and to ward off those without; in the same way a disciple of the noble ones is mindful, highly meticulous, remembering & able to call to mind even things that were done & said long ago. With mindfulness as his gatekeeper, the disciple of the noble ones abandons what is unskillful & develops what is skillful, abandons what is blameworthy & develops what is blameless, and looks after himself with purity...

There were various exercises designed to develop mindfulness, but they were all ultimately aimed at guarding this space.  Let’s look at each of these four obstacles to our quiet minds 

The senses:  
Stimulation makes it possible for three poisons to arise and also distracts us from focusing on emptiness.  Paying attention to what’s coming in through the sense gates and how we react to that lets us see how much grasping and clinging and story-writing is actually happening.  Usually our attention kind of roams free in a rather involuntary and passive way, catching onto stuff as it goes by.  This is a practice of voluntarily controlling or disciplining attention.  The senses at work are not in themselves a problem; the problem is that we get seduced or enchanted by what comes in.  We make sense-data a priority, and they’re all we can see.

Now we can see that this kind of mindfulness isn’t just being aware of what’s coming in.  It’s also actively controlling what comes in and making an effort to reduce the volume of those stimuli.  For example, during sesshin some practitioners walk around with their eyes down.  We also keep zendos simple and free from distraction.  In early Buddhism, this is why monks left home life and withdrew from the world, didn’t handle money, didn’t touch the opposite sex and had only a robe and bowl.  The average person today can’t live in seclusion, but it doesn’t mean that mindfulness practice isn’t possible or appropriate.  In fact, this isn’t what we mean by paying attention to the senses in Soto Zen.  In some ways, we really do need to break from the lives of habituated thinking, assumptions and delusions that we’ve been leading up to now, but as bodhisattvas we do that in the midst of the world, not separate from it.

Bodily movement:
If the body isn’t settled, the heart and mind will never settle and vice versa.  We have to move around during the day, and that’s fine.  We’re talking here about movements that are uncontrolled, hasty, uncoordinated, or done carelessly.  We can pay attention to everything from breathing to how we cook lunch to how we use the toilet.  Dogen wrote about this, and there’s a lot in our tradition about deportment.  It isn’t that there’s only one right way to brush our teeth or open and close a door or walk around in the zendo; the guidelines are a means of getting us to pay attention to what we’re doing.

Desires:
It’s tough to stay calm and balanced in the face of strong craving and aversion, so we need some real self-awareness and insight in order to see what’s happening and know what to do.  We’ve got to be honest and say Yes, there’s that attachment again.  I don’t want to give it up because it feels good or boosts my ego, but I have faith that if I’m not pulled around by this thing my suffering will diminish.  Paying attention to the state of our craving and aversion can seem like an awful lot of self-involvement, and indeed, it can go that way; we have to be careful.  We have to remember that this is just five skandhas operating in the way that five skandhas operate, and it’s not personal.

Discursive thinking:
Discursive thinking is the background noise going on in our heads.  It bounces around from daydreaming to replaying conversations to worrying about the future to wishing we had cherry pie, and it’s frequently driven by craving and aversion.  It’s what we do when we’re not paying a lot of attention to our mindstate, and usually when we’re doing it our ability to really see and take in what’s happening here and now is diminished.

We know our practice of letting go of that stream and returning to our current experience in zazen as opening the hand of thought.  In order to do that, we have to recognize that we’re engaged in discursive thinking.  Then we have the choice to let go of it and for it to let go of us.

Whatever practice you were doing, the early role of mindfulness was to remember what you were supposed to be working on.  If your exercise was to pay attention to sensations in the body, or the breath, or phenomena arising and passing, or whatever, mindfulness keeps track of the focus of that exercise.  As we’ve seen, there’s been a shift in what mindfulness means between early practice and what Dogen taught.  Our practice is not about withdrawing from the world, but about seeing how samsara and Nirvana are not separate and learning how to be completely engaged in what’s happening without losing sight of the true nature of reality. 

At Gate 55 I introduced a section from the Eihei Koroku in which Dogen said that Buddha’s teaching about the four foundations of mindfulness was that the body was impure, sensations were suffering,  mind was impermanent, and phenomena were non-substantial.  However, Dogen said that the body was a skin-bag, sensations were eating bowls, the mind was fences, tiles, pebbles and walls, and phenomena were old man Zhang drinking wine, old man Li getting drunk.  The pattern for each of these is that Dogen takes the Buddha’s conclusion about each of these four foundations of mindfulness and replaces it with a concrete example of emptiness, if you will.  The early teachings were designed to break our enchantment with these things.  Dogen’s are too, but in a different way: don’t push them away, but see them as they really are, not as you’d like them to be.

Practicing with mindfulness in the Soto Zen tradition is a bit different than in early Buddhism.  We can trace that shift as Zen moves across Asia.  When it gets to China, it encounters a very different culture than in India.  Renouncing the world in China was a complete abrogation of societal responsibilities.  Practice there was about living in the world and understanding you were part of it rather than trying to transcend it or leap off the wheel, because the world itself was a place of awakening and being in the midst of it was how you came to understand it.  Rather than focusing on one element and holding that in mindfulness, you focused on the interconnectedness of all elements.  In fact, if you concentrate on one thing, it can take up all your psychic space so you can’t be aware of anything else.

It may seem strange that mindfulness can be about awareness of the universe as a whole instead of concentrating on one thing.  How can I attend to everything at once?  Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it—that we think there’s an I that has to be in charge of processing everything that comes in, rather than remembering that there is no separate I doing something?

We should take a moment here to consider mind or xin 心 as a word.  We’re not talking about psychological mind.  The original terms include the heart as well as the mind; there’s a sense in which the psychological mind is in the realm of subject and object while the heart/mind is about non-separation.  Okumura Roshi says: Uchiyama Kosho Roshi often said that the xin used in Zen is not “psychological mind,” but it is rather “life,” which includes both subject and object. In the 1970s when I tried to explain this to an American friend, he was puzzled by the expression “psychological mind” and asked, “Is there such a thing as mind that is not psychological?” In Zen, I think we would say yes.

“Many kinds of work” in the gate statement above actually means wholesome or morally good actions, though there is a kanji there for work activity.  It’s very much about everyday tasks related to operations, manufacturing, producing, cultivating, harvesting, or doing business.  I’d say there’s a connection here with right livelihood as well as right mindfulness on the eightfold path.

Intersecting these two things—mindfulness and work—we get the teaching that being aware of emptiness and interconnectedness lets us carry out our tasks in the temple or the world in a way that brings wholesomeness and liberates beings from suffering.  The gate statement says “thoroughly” perform many kinds or work, and that says to me nonseparation of actor and action.  Doing work in a mindful way seems like an individual activity: I’m cleaning my gutters or washing my floor by myself and keeping my attention on what this body and mind are doing.  However, in the Eihei Shingi, Dogen says we have to do our work with both a private mind and a public mind.  He’s talking about the work leader when he says this, but by extension he means all of us.  When we’re working with or supervising others, we pay attention to their situations as well as our own.  When we’re working alone, we’re still part of this interconnected reality living with all beings.

In their translation of the Eihei Shingi, Okumura Roshi and Taigen Leighton say in the introduction:
Mindful work is work done without a doer, a task, or an outcome. When we are not separate from action, we perform thoroughly—we do all that is necessary with nothing extra and nothing left out. No matter whether the task at hand is simple, like putting books back on a shelf, or more complex, like figuring out why the car has suddenly begun to make a high-pitched whine, we can do it seamlessly. That doesn’t mean we do it to the exclusion of awareness that the bookend is about to tip over or that a toddler on a trike has just pedaled up behind the back bumper. As Dogen teaches in the Tenzo Kyokun (Instructions for the Cook), each item with which we’re working needs to be handled carefully and with understanding about its relationship to all other dharmas. He quotes an old teacher: When steaming rice, regard the pot as your own head; when washing rice, know that the water is your own life.

Later on in that book, Dogen quotes an earlier text, the Zen-en Shingi:  For monks to be practicing peacefully in their quarters and value and protect the temple property is the reward of the work leader.  Clearly the work leader’s job is to take care of people in the community, not just to worry about the building and grounds.  There’s a public mind necessary for that role and the ability to exercise prajna in managing daily repairs and maintenance and operations, but the work leader isn’t the only one with responsibility in that relationship.  Workers and community members also need to have a public mind, not just self-interest.

Dogen goes on to quote the Zen-en Shingi again: For a resident monk to receive and use something without thinking of its use by later people is what is not rewarding for the work leader.  I can imagine the work leader’s frustration when he goes to get a hand sickle from the shop and finds they’re all missing, or that the wheelbarrow got broken and wasn’t fixed or replaced, or somebody used up the last of the glue and rice paper for fixing the doors and didn’t say anything.  It’s a poor return for the effort and care and attention the work leader is exercising in supporting the sangha.  It’s like the sangha is saying your work belongs to me and my work belongs to me, so there!

Dogen makes the point that the work leader’s effort and reward is the community’s effort and reward and vice versa.  How could the work leader’s job be only the spreading of conventional truth?  How could this be only something received and used as a means to get somewhere along the road?  This is a classic example of seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action.  We’ve got mindfulness of what we’re doing here and now as well as mindfulness of the universe as a whole.  For the work leader, he’s taking care of everyone in the temple and the temple itself by carrying out everyday tasks.  For the community, they’re picking up and using things to do the things they need to do, but they’re not forgetting about the use of those things by later people.

The work leader is doing more than spreading conventional truth, in other words, just moving about in the world of form.  The community is doing more than just accepting the support of the work leader taking care of the temple so they can do their own practice and get themselves somewhere farther along down the road.  The mutual activity of work leader and community is itself a complete expression of thusness and awakening.  It’s thoroughly doing many kinds of work.

Mindful work isn’t about doing something now to get a reward later.  It’s the total functioning of this moment, with nothing outside of here and now.  I’m not only cleaning my gutters so that when it rains tomorrow the water doesn’t back up.  I’m not only washing my floor so the floor will be clean.  Simply carrying out those activities is itself practice if we don’t forget to approach them with attention.  That’s when we step through this dharma gate and engage in work for the benefit of all beings.

There’s a pitfall here: we can get really precious about sweeping the zendo or washing the teapot.  We can get some idea about what mindful work “should” be.  Then it becomes magical and special and we try to wring some peak experience out of it.  It’s just sweeping the zendo and washing the teapot.  Those activities aren’t any more pure or worthy than writing a piece of software or selling insurance or fixing the car.  I’ve seen people reluctant to use their professional skills on behalf of their temple when asked. because “I do that all week.  When I’m here I just want to do simple jobs that are real practice!”  Uusually that means something like raking gravel or cleaning incense burners or sweeping the front walk with a twig broom.  They have some idea about doing simple medieval Asian tasks (that’s real practice!) as opposed to what sangha really needs, which might be budgeting or legal advice or human resource management or something.

Yes, what the work leader does to take care of the temple is bodhisattva activity and mindful work—building altars, cutting down trees, repairing walls and ceilings—but so is board service and helping to manage the electronic archive and taking care of our own lives, families, jobs and schoolwork.  Seeing the way Buddha sees, in other words being mindful of both form and emptiness, means we can do many kinds of work as beneficial action.

The faculty of effort is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we thoroughly attain many kinds of wisdom.
進根是法明門、善得智故。

We continue this time with the five faculties that lead to liberation, within the 37 constituent factors of bodhi, or awakening.  These start with faith or belief and build on each other until they lead to wisdom, so in the beginning we take things on trust and by the end we see and understand for ourselves.  Including effort or energy may seems strange when our main practice is sitting still for long periods of time, but faith makes our effort possible, so this is next link in the chain.

Energy or effort is what sustains our practice so that we can work with hindrances and pitfalls and develop some maturity over time.  Awakening is already here, but there’s a lot about our practice that ripens and deepens as we become more mature practitioners.  That doesn’t happen overnight; this is a lifelong practice.  

It’s just common sense that if we want to engage in something, nothing is going to happen unless we make some effort.  Nagarjuna says that laziness in practice is like poisoned food: it looks and smells great at first, but ultimately it kills you.  It may seem easier or more fun to go at our practice kind of half-heartedly, but that’s not really going to allow us to liberate ourselves from suffering.

We keep encountering the teaching that buddhas or teachers or deities can’t practice for us.  We have to make our own effort, because even if all the causes and conditions are there, unless we’re diligent and put the teachings into practice, liberation from suffering doesn’t happen.  In a way, effort or exertion is a part of all 37 factors of bodhi.  We can talk about it separately, but there’s effort in mindfulness, concentration, developing spiritual powers, etc.

What we’re applying effort toward is the four exertions: cultivating wholesomeness, maintaining it, keeping unwholesomeness from arising, and making it go away when it’s already here.  As we saw with the four bases of mystical power, even if we make “progress” in our practice, we can’t stop making effort or we’ll backslide.  Habituated thinking kicks back in and we forget about practice and the dharma.  We lose the wholesomeness we’ve cultivated and no more arises.  Unwholesomeness starts arising again and doesn’t leave.  

A couple of aspects of skillfulness are involved in making effort.  We have to know what skillfullness to encourage and maintain, and what unskillfulness to discourage and abandon.  We also have to be skillful in how we do that.  We need to be skillful in encouraging skillfulness!  If the means of cultivating skillfulness is itself unskillful, we’ve got a problem; for instance, treating hatred with hatred is a problem.  To skillfully cultivate skillfulness, we need to really understand cause and effect.  If we do something unwholesome for the sake of helping something wholesome to arise, that could be dangerous.  We have to see clearly what we’re doing and what kind of effort we’re making.

Thus energy alone doesn’t work so well.  It needs the support of the other elements of the eightfold path and all of the other 37 elements of bodhi including wisdom, which is the second half of this gate statement.  We’ll talk more about that in a moment.

We can start to see the connection between faith or belief and effort.  Remember that Gate 58 said that with belief, we don’t blindly follow the words of others.  Dogen says:  With humility, we should not slacken and regress.  Such not slackening nor regressing involves making diligent effort.  To be diligent means not seeking fame and profit, and not having attachments to sounds and colors.  

Therefore we should not look at the words and phrases of Confucius or Laozi, and should not look at the Surangama or Complete Enlightenment scriptures. . . . We should exclusively study the expressions coming from the activities of buddhas and ancestors from the time of the seven world-honored buddhas to the present.  If we are not concerned with the activities of the buddha ancestors, and vainly make our efforts in the evil path of fame and profit, how could this be the study of the way? (1)

Faith also keeps us from looking in the wrong place for ways to sustain our effort.  If we’re looking for recognition for our exertion, we might not get it—but is that really the reason we’re practicing?  Are we looking for a personal reward, some special experience or mystical power?  Even Uchiyama Roshi had to struggle with that.  He says:  I had a very hard time when I stayed at a temple in Nagano for a year in 1947-48.  Although I practiced wholeheartedly, no one recognized my efforts.  Rather I was used like a servant by an old woman at the temple.  I felt miserable! . . . I always felt that I was throwing stones into a bottomless ravine.  I didn’t have even the slightest response from others about my activities.  Empty space is like this.  No matter how hard we practice, there is no response.  And yet we just keep practicing.  This is the point: we have to practice. (2) 

We also need some discernment about how much effort to make.  Sometimes we see something less than ideal arising and all we really need to do to dissolve it is to watch it and pay attention, but sometimes it takes a lot of effort for some unwholesome, unskillful thing to get dismantled.  We need to not exhaust ourselves, but we also need to not give up too soon or think we’ve somehow reached the end of practice.  However, of course, even before that we need to understand delusion and to see our own tendency toward the three poisons and the suffering that come from them.  There’s a passage in the Pali canon where Shariputra and Mogallana are talking about effort, and the upshot is that unless we see how we’re influenced by our craving and aversion to engage in unwholesome actions, we never arouse the energy and determination to practice and liberate ourselves.  Even if we really are without any delusion and suffering, we still need to make effort to keep those things from arising, so there’s no escaping the need for energy and effort.

There seem to be two images of practice, particularly something that looks like “meditation.”  One is that Zen practice is intensive and all about effort, and if you’re not working hard enough on your cushion, someone will come up behind you and hit you with a stick.  The other is that Zen is all about peace and calm and quiet and accepting whatever is happening, so you shouldn’t have to make any effort at all.  (For related teachings, see information about our sixth point of practice, balancing peace and progress.)

Then there’s Dogen’s famous question: if awakening is already here, why make the effort to practice?  We’re not creating or acquiring something with our practice, so why go to all that work for something that exists already?  The answer is that we don’t yet see what Buddha saw.  We can’t always act skillfully based on a clear picture of reality.  We still get hijacked by our delusions, craving and aversion, so we need to practice dropping off body and mind and returning to original self or emptiness.

Dogen’s always telling us not to waste time or spend our efforts in vain, but to energetically extinguish the flames on our heads and to courageously and diligently go forward in practice.  This teaching appears over and over.  Of course, the irony of making effort is that there isn’t really a “self” making an effort.  As soon as we have an idea about effort, then we’re not making pure effort.  On the other hand, if we’re wholeheartedly engaged in something, there’s no separation between ourselves and the activity, so there isn’t an extra thing called effort; there’s just activity happening.

Uchiyama Roshi says: It is dangerous to say, “I am working hard,” because later on we may say, “I am tired of it.  I’ll quit.”  Unconditionally, without expecting rewards, without gaining something, we just keep making an effort.  This is true diligence as the practice of paramita. (3) 

Okumura Roshi adds: Since we are part of all dharmas, the foundation of our practice must be our awakening to the reality that we are indeed part of all dharmas, or part of Buddha.  In other words, it is not I who practice, but rather Buddha carries our Buddha’s practice through me.  In our zazen practice and in our daily activity of bodhisattva practice, it is not a matter of individual actions based on individual willpower and effort.  It is rather the myriad dharmas, or all beings, that carry out practice through our individual bodies and minds. (4) 

When I was training in Japan, one day most of the other monks were away and there was just me, my friend and maybe one other person running the temple.  There are a lot of jobs in a senmon sodo, or training temple, and a lot of things that need to happen every day.  Some things are ceremonial and some things are about basic operations, but my friend and I remarked to each other about the many things that had to be done every day just to live there.  Someone had to cook meals, wash dishes, prepare the bath, carry out liturgy three times a day, deal with visitors and deliveries, answer the phone, and open and close the shutters and doors in the morning and evening.  That’s not counting the two work periods a day.  A day in a senmon sodo is a fairly complex operation, somewhat less so on days where people aren’t available or there’s something else happening, but for the most part we’re moving from 4 am to 9 pm.  You can leave your books and pastimes at home when you enter the senmon sodo—you’ll never have time for that stuff.

When we think about it, we’re always making a tremendous effort just to live, no matter our circumstances.  The body alone is doing all kinds of complex operations.  Change is happening all the time, so there’s really no getting away from expending energy.  The question is: where is that energy coming from and where is it going?

Sometimes we expend energy in a conscious striving toward something, trying to reach a goal, learn something or build something or get from here to there.  We expect to have a certain amount of control over what happens, and that’s a kind of individual effort, or a group of individuals.

There’s also the expending of energy that’s simply the universe doing what the universe does.  I might plant seeds and say I’m growing a crop, but I don’t really have anything to do with it.  The causes and conditions are such that plants are growing day by day on their own.  They’re taking in energy from the sun, rain and soil and expending energy to grow.  The seed’s effort is to negate being a seed and to grow into a plant.  Okumura Roshi points out: A baby just being 100 oercent a baby has the energy to negate babyhood and become a boy or girl.  Similarly, when we do something wholeheartedly with full attentiveness, that focused practice provides the energy that enables us to grow.  In this sense, a baby is not simply a baby; within the complete babyhood of being a baby, the baby negates babyhood itself. . . . And although the baby is doing such a complicated thing as negating babyhood, the baby does not conceive this; the baby is just wholeheartedly being a baby.  Our practice of zazen is the same as this. (5)

Now we get to consider the connection between effort and zazen.  Yes, we’re sitting and not moving, but we all know that’s not always easy.  It takes some effort to take the posture, keep the eyes open, breathe deeply and open the hand of thought.  If we’re paying attention, our posture feels natural and not forced, and not engaging in thought is not the same as actively pushing thought away, but still, it takes some energy.  Otherwise, we’re asleep.  If you sit a sesshin with other people, there’s a certain kind of settled, focused energy in the room, and yet we’re not straining to achieve something.  Certainly we’re not running away from our thoughts.  We’re just coming back to this moment, over and over, so we do have to be a bit careful about where our energy is going in zazen.

When we talk about making effort, particularly in zazen, we assume we’re supposed to be doing something.  Yes, our zazen is active, but there’s no me-doing-something.  Something is happening, energy is being expended, but I’m not driving that bus.  Uchiyama Roshi notes: It is not a matter of making a great effort not to be dragged around by desires.  It is just waking up and returning to the reality of life that is essential.  If we apply this to zazen, it means that, even if various thoughts do occur, they will all vanish when we wake up to zazen. (6)  

We can find other ways to practice with this even outside of zazen.  For instance, the way to work with impatience isn’t to work extra hard to be patient, or to argue with impatience and have aversion to it, but to see how it arises and let go of it.  One way to consider making effort is that starving a hindrance is a way of cultivating the opposite virtue or allowing that virtue to arise.  Effort is particularly important for bodhisattvas because they don’t practice for themselves.  Whatever good they don’t cultivate is good they can’t turn around and offer to others.  Whatever hindrances they don’t dissolve keep them from liberating others from suffering.  

In the Tenzo Kyokun, Dogen says: Future students must be able to see that side from this side as well as this side from that side.  [Here’s the major theme of the Mahayana, seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action.]  Practicing with intense effort, using all your ingenuity, you will be able to grasp genuine Zen that goes beyond the surface.  To do otherwise will only result in being led about by variously tainted Zen that will leave you incapable of preparing meals skillfully for the community. (7)

In other words, if we don’t make the effort to stay on the path, it’s not only ourselves who are affected; it inhibits our ability to help others.  Even if we try hard and really exert ourselves to help others, we’re just not going to have the wisdom and compassion to do that skillfully.  

The gate statement says that with effort we thoroughly attain many kinds of wisdom.  The actual kanji 善得智 say something like “the virtue of wisdom.”  In translating early Buddhist texts, 智 was used for jnana, which is awareness or understanding as opposed to knowledge or intelligence.  Sometimes this character was also used for prajna, the wisdom of seeing the true nature of reality.

In fact, working on the four exertions or four restraints is sometimes called “wise effort.”  Putting energy into cultivating and maintaining wholesomeness and preventing and diminishing unwholesomeness is a wise thing to do.  We have to have the wisdom to discern what is a skillful use of effort and what isn’t, and how much effort is enough or too much or not enough.  To do that, we have to have a broad view.

Making effort is itself practice.  It’s not a means to an end.  We make effort because that’s what we’re doing right now, not because there’s something outside of here and now that’s going to appear.  Approached with wisdom and a spirit of inquiry, effort can tell us a lot about ourselves.  Am I making effort to shore up my sense of self or prove something to myself or others?  Am I striving for some kind of evidence that I’m doing this right?  All of this stuff just perpetuates habituated thinking.  Am I making less effort because I think whatever is supposed to happen in my practice is impossible?  Or because I really hate zazen but everyone says it’s good for me?  If so, some discernment and honesty with ourselves is called for.

If you spend the whole zazen period daydreaming about where else you’d rather be, or gritting your teeth and just getting through it, or, it’s time to try to gain some insight into what’s going on.  Okumura Roshi always reminded us that “our practice is not a torture.”  Sesshin at Sanshin is intensive, but it’s not an opportunity to prove you’re a samurai.

There are lots of ways that effort can go off the rails.  We need to make sure that what we’re doing is wise effort, just as Shakyamuni’s was, not too cushy, not too austere, not lazy, not being a workaholic, not sitting intensively for several days or a week and then not getting on the cushion again for a month.  Buddha said in his last teaching that this kind of stopping and starting was as ineffective as rubbing two sticks together to make a fire and then stopping before the wood got warm.

How can we make effortless effort, or strive without striving?  We can accept what’s happening in this eternal now without struggling to avoid it or falling in love with it.  We spend a lot of energy on rewriting our experience of this moment based on our expectations.  We also work pretty hard at trying to control what’s happening.  Some things we can control, but first we have to see what’s really going on, and frequently we don’t actually need to control it.  With wisdom, we can redirect the effort we make in unskillful, unwholesome or ignorant activity toward something else.

Notes:

(1) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications p. 341-342.
​(2) Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary. (2018). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 51.
(3) Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom, p. 37.
(4) Okumura, S. (2010). Realizing Genjokoan: The Key to Dogen's Shobogenzo. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 54.
​(5) Realizing Genjokoan, p. 178.
​(6) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 57.
​(7) Roshi, K. U. (2005). How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment. United States: Shambhala, p. 12.

[58] The faculty of belief is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not [blindly] follow the words of others.
信根是法明門、不隨他語故。

We continue this time with the section of the text that’s describing the constituent factors of bodhi, or awakening.  In early teachings, these were linear steps on an extended path of deepening practice toward reaching nirvana.  Now we’re starting on the five faculties that lead to liberation.  Each of these faculties isn’t really new—we’ve talked about them before—but one thing that’s important here is how they fit together with each other and with other teachings.

The early teachings say that if a bodhisattva acquires these five faculties, he or she will be able to believe in the true nature of dharmas.  Each of these five leads to the next: belief or faith leads to energy => mindfulness => concentration => wisdom.  This should seem familiar; it’s the samadhi section of the eightfold path: right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

We’re starting here with the faculty of belief, also translated as faith or conviction.  The theme that runs through teachings about faith or belief from the Buddha right through Uchiyama Roshi is that it’s difficult for deluded human beings to see what Buddha saw, and in some ways it’s difficult to understand the true nature of zazen.  It’s difficult to put aside our own filters and preconceptions and be in touch with the dharma in a really deep way, so we need faith that what Buddha awakened to is real, that we can experience that for ourselves in our practice, and that zazen is a complete expression of that awakening.

Faith or conviction is more than just accepting a set of beliefs.  There are said to be four elements of conviction, but there are two different sets of the four elements of conviction within the tradition.  One has to do with how we cultivate faith; another has to do with what we have faith in.  Both of these are helpful.

The first set of factors includes intellectual, volitional, emotional and social elements.  The intellectual factor has to do with what we believe.  We’re going along with teachings that might not immediately appear to have a basis in fact or evidence.  Our usual thinking and experience leads us to conclude that reality is not the same as what Buddha says it is.  Our thinking minds might be unaware of the teachings or we might be aware but have some doubts, so this only works initially if we have some trust in scriptures, teachers or some other element.  Then once we have some actual experience of practice and some insight, we verify for ourselves that these teachings are true.

With the volitional factor we have the will and the courage to step forward and actually practice.  There’s an element of steadfastness and resolution, and also some self-confidence that we can do it.  We put aside our fears, waverings, skepticism, and the need to get some immediate payback, and we settle down in the practice.

The emotional factor allows us to let go of worries and anxieties and have some sense of peace and clarity.  Someone who has faith is said to lose the five terrors: loss of the necessities of life, loss of reputation, death, unhappy rebirth, and making a poor impression on an audience.  That all makes sense when we come to understand no-self and emptiness.  We have less to do to manage our egos.

The social factor is related to who we trust.  There’s a turn from reliance on public opinion or what Sawaki Roshi called group stupidity to faith in the three treasures.  Monks in early Buddhism really did leave society; we don’t, but we make a shift away from social influences that may not be wholesome.  There’s some measure of renunciation.  We choose to spend time in the sangha with others who practice and are making an effort to live in Buddha’s way.  That doesn’t mean we give up other relationships, but we try to see them clearly and make our own choices about what we go along with.

There’s an image of our place in Buddha’s family that says that Buddha is the father, Prajnaparamita is the mother, and the sangha is the brothers and sisters.  That brings us to the question: what is the thing in which we have faith?

It’s said that there are four such things:

• karma and rebirth, or cause and effect
• basic teachings about the nature of reality: dependent origination, emptiness, etc.
• the Three Treasures
• the practice itself as a means of liberating beings from suffering

Buddha says that believing in and following in any other path would be like trying to squeeze sesame oil out of gravel. or to churn butter out of water.  Belief is what provides inspiration and aspiration, and helps resolve doubt.  Taking refuge in the Three Treasures is one of the most basic things we do in this tradition.  Without making some commitment based on faith, it’s not really possible to practice.

When we start to practice, that’s sometimes called entering the stream in the Buddhist tradition.  Early texts say that it’s exactly stream-entry where we see the faculty of belief that this gate statement talks about.  There are four factors of stream entry:

• association with good people
• listening to the true Dharma
• appropriate attention
• practice in accordance with the Dharma

Once we enter the stream, our faith in the three treasures is awakened and also supported.  The Abhisanda Sutta says the person is endowed with verified confidence in the Awakened One: ‘Indeed, the Blessed One is worthy and rightly self-awakened, consummate in knowledge & conduct, well-gone, an expert with regard to the world, unexcelled as a trainer for those people fit to be tamed, the Teacher of divine & human beings, awakened, blessed.’

He is endowed with verified confidence in the Dhamma: ‘The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, to be seen here & now, timeless, inviting verification, pertinent, to be realized by the wise for themselves.’

He is endowed with verified confidence in the Saṅgha: ‘The Saṅgha of the Blessed One’s disciples who have practiced well... who have practiced straight-forwardly... who have practiced methodically... who have practiced masterfully — in other words . . . the Saṅgha of the Blessed One’s disciples [is] worthy of gifts, worthy of hospitality, worthy of offerings, worthy of respect, the incomparable field of merit for the world.’

We can see how some of these elements are starting to come together: trust in wise people that they know what practice is about and how to do it; belief in what the Buddha, ancestors and teachers are teaching; and willingness to make the leap and actually put those teachings into practice with body and mind.  

If we believe in Buddha’s awakening, we eventually come to see how delusion and suffering arise, how cause and effect work, how central they are, and that we can take real steps to deal with our suffering.  It can be difficult to accept that we can use our karmic conditions to transcend our karmic conditions.  Sometimes we feel pretty limited and ignorant, and we fall prey to the hindrances that go with this human form, but we also know that our karmic conditions are the ground of our practice and there’s nowhere else to go.

The second half of the gate statement says we do not [blindly] follow the words of others.  Faith and the actual activity of our practice can’t be separated.  We need some level of trust to begin practicing, and we need personal experience of practice in order to strengthen our conviction and stay on the path.  At that point we can stop blindly wandering around looking for this spiritual technique and that practice and some other teaching.  One important element of faith is the belief that everything we need to liberate ourselves and others from suffering is right here in Buddha’s teaching.  We don’t need to go trying to supplement practice with other stuff.

It’s another aspect of “nothing extra.”  There are only four things we do in our zazen: take the posture, keep our  eyes open, breathe through the nose,  and open the hand of thought.  Anything else is extra, and somehow we need to have faith in that.

The other side of that is that there’s also nothing in the teachings and practice that we can ignore.  We can’t really separate the three categories in the eightfold path.  For instance, if we’re trying to sit zazen without the ethical element, we’re going to have trouble letting go of suffering.  The teachings and practice are both complete in themselves with nothing extra and nothing lacking, but accepting that takes a certain amount of faith.  Thus this is really not about just intellectually accepting ideas.  If the spiritual activity is only in our minds, it’s hard to stick with it because we’re not really living it moment by moment.  

Sometimes teachings and practice are a challenge to our ego, our self-image, and our stories about the world and ourselves.  It’s a real test of faith to practice according to the dharma and put aside our likes and dislikes and not pick and choose the parts of the practice or the teachings that match our own ideas.  Buddha’s teachings are an elegant system and all elements are interconnected.  They support and reinforce each other and support us in moving toward liberation from suffering.

Now let’s see how our more immediate ancestors talk about conviction, faith or belief.  Dogen Zenji wrote about this quite a bit.  Among other things, he wrote an entire fascicle of the Shobogenzo on having faith in the three treasures (Kie Bupposo-ho).  Clearly he saw it as an important element of practice, and even included it when he wrote his personal vow about practice:
Along with all living beings, I wish, from this lifetime through many lifetimes, to hear the true dharma.  When I hear it, I will not doubt the true Dharma; I will not lack faith.  When I encounter the true Dharma, I will discard numdane principles and accept and maintain the Buddha-dharma.  Finally, I will complete the Way, together with the great earth and all living beings. (1) 

Also he wrote in the Gakudo Yojinshu: Practitioners of the Way must first of all have faith in the Way.  Those who have faith in the buddha way must believe that one is within the Way from the beginning, that one is free from delusive desires, upside-down ways of seeing things, excesses or deficiencies, and mistakes.  

Okumura Roshi’s comment about this is: This is the basis of our practice.  Although we are already in the Way, we are deluded and miss the Way.  It is strange, but that is reality.  We are in the Way from the beginningless beginning, and yet we are deluded human beings to the endless end.  So our practice, our vow, is endless.  And if we practice in that way, then each activity , each practice moment by moment, is the perfect manifestation of the buddha way. (2)

Again we see that faith or belief is really central to our practice.  In fact, Okumura Roshi calls it the basis of our practice.  It’s difficult to accept that in spite of our delusions and misunderstandings, awakening is already here and we’re already not outside of the Buddha Way. 

Dogen says in the Bendowa: On the whole, the buddha realm is incomprehensible, unreachable through discrimination, much less can it be known with no faith and inferior insight.  Only people of great capacity and true faith are able to enter.  People without faith have difficulty accepting, even when taught.  . . . Generally, if true faith arises in your heart, you should practice and study.  If it does not, you should give it up for a while and regret not having the blessing of dharma from long ago. (3)  

People without faith have difficulty accepting, even when taught.  It’s interesting that Dogen says if we don’t have faith we should just stop—we’ll have such a hard time trying to practice if we’re skeptical about awakening, the three treasures and the nature of self.  

Uchiyama Roshi defines faith as the process of clarifying and becoming lucid about the structure and workings of the life force. (4)  That’s an interesting contrast to definitions we might be more used to in a spiritual context, like belief in a God or religious doctrine.  Uchiyama Roshi says that if we get clear about how the universe and reality really work, that’s faith or belief because we let go of our clinging to the stories we create from our ideas and that become reality for us.  We shift from our reliance on or faith in our delusion to reliance on how Buddhas and ancestors see reality, even if we can’t yet see it for ourselves.

That’s a big shift!  Why would we not believe in our notions of the world that we’ve been developing, curating and acting on for our whole lives?  Of course we assume that as good, smart people we can base our decisions and actions on what we think.  It takes some real courage to look carefully at those assumptions and verify whether they’re real or not.

Uchiyama Roshi continues:  Having faith means believing that things seen through one’s own eyes are not real, but things seen by buddha’s eye are real.  However, if you think that believing this is also nothing but a kind of thought, you overturn the idea.  This is doubting.  But the idea is overturned yet again when you let go of the doubt, because such a doubt itself is nothing ither than a thought.  It is an interesting world.  You can let go of such doubts, too.  This is determined faith.  No matter what kind of thought it is, it will fall away when we let go.  This is where the whole world of zazen opens. (5)  

Now we get to the relationship between faith and zazen.  Our thoughts about the world are just our thoughts.  Our ideas about faith or belief are also just thoughts.  Our doubts are also just thoughts.  We can let go of the whole thing when we sit down.

Elsewhere, Uchiyama Roshi explains:  It can be said that in zazen we “believe and sit,” but then we have to look at the meaning of “believe” in its Buddhist sense.  Ordinarily, we use the word “believe” to mean thinking what someone has said is true.  In religion when an agent of a god or God has said that there exists an invisible, metaphysical realm, the God has such ans such powers. or that man has a soul, people have assumed it to be true and have acted accordingly.  This has been called belief or faith.  However, in Buddhism the fundamental definition of “belief” is totally different.  It is clarity and purity.  In Buddhism, “belief” does not mean to believe something in one’s mind, such as that every person has an individual soul or that God exists outside us.

Belief, in Buddhism, is to become clear and pure in actualizing the reality of universal life. . . . In zazen we let go of thoughts, lower our level of excitement, and live the universal self just truly being self.  This is the basic meaning of belief, to the very act of doing zazen is an expression of our belief. (6) 

There are a couple of ways to look at the relationship between faith and zazen.  One is that we have faith that when we sit down and drop off body and mind, awakening is already there, and that zazen is a complete manifestation of that awakening.  Another is that we have faith that zazen brings wholesomeness to the world beyond ourselves as individuals.  We’ve heard before that zazen is not an individual activity; we do it with all beings because of interconnectedness.  Our practice is supported by all beings and it supports all beings.

It can be frustrating, when we’re looking around at all the suffering in the world, to hear from our ancestors that one of the best things we can do is sit zazen.  We just think: how does that help?  If we were praying for intercession, that at least feels like action.  It’s tough to believe that zazen itself is a form of beneficial action.

However, Uchiyama Roshi reminds us:  At the time, one person’s zazen influences other people and causes a chain reaction; their zazen is transmitted to more people and finally it will circulate to the entire society.  Under these circumstnaces, for the first time, we can say that human beings will open the first page of a history that is truly humane.  I have been practicing zazen with such a deep vow and faith, like a prayer. (7)  

It’s another example of our need for some humility in this practice.  We don’t know it all yet; Okumura Roshi has called us as practitioners “baby bodhisattvas.”  Until we can figure out how to experience the world in ways other than through relying completely on what we do with the information that comes in through the sense gates, deciding whether we like those sensations or not and then basing our lives on chasing and avoiding, we need to rely on the three treasures and not get led astray by unwholesome influences, or blindly follow the words of others, as the gate statement says.

When I teach introductory classes on Zen, there’s a point where the content shifts from things that are relatively easy to understand intellectually to things that are really new.  The four noble truths seem relatively straightforward.  Zazen posture is pretty tangible.  Buddha’s life story is no problem.  Then we get to no-self and emptiness and dependent origination, and I watch people become puzzled.  In fact, I warn them that the shift is coming so they don’t get discouraged.  If you don’t get this intellectually, it’s fine.  Just let it percolate.  It’s another way of saying: have faith.

Forms, small self and the relative aspect of reality seem easier to accept and deal with.  Emptiness, the universal self and the absolute seem more difficult to accept.  We can’t see, measure and describe them.  It might even be tough to accept that there are two sides to this one reality, and yet that’s the major theme of the Mahayana, as Okumura Roshi says, seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides with one action.  Because it is difficult to fathom and grasp both sides of reality at once using concepts and intellect, as the Lotus Sutra says, we need the power of faith.  Through our practice based on faith, we can experience the true reality even though we cannot see and measure it as an object. (8)

Now we need to talk about the potential pitfalls of faith.  Like everything else in practice, faith can be medicine or poison.  Vasubandhu back in the 5th century recognized that faith can go off the rails.  He wrote a famous commentary on the Abidharma, which is a detailed, academic presentation of what Buddha taught in the sutras.  He pointed out that faith is not necessarily pure and uncontaminated by its nature.  Faith applied in the wrong way towards an unskillful object can lead to blind guru-worship, and things go downhill from there toward breaking precepts and various kinds of unskillfulness.  Thus it’s interesting that while the gate statement says The faculty of belief is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not [blindly] follow the words of others, that can all go the other way if we’re not careful.  As the Russians say, doveryai, no proveryai: trust but verify.

We also need to say a word here about tolerance.  Buddhism is not a mainstream tradition here in the US we frequently encounter people whose faith is different from ours.  We may believe so much in our practice that we think everyone should sit zazen and read Living by Vow and Opening the Hand of Thought.  If people want know what we’re doing, that great; we can tell them.  If not, we leave them alone.  Because we’re not a mainstream tradition, we’re probably more likely to be the objects of someone else’s evangelism than the ones carrying that out, but it does happen the other way.

When I worked for the government and people started to learn about my Buddhist practice, I heard that a supervisor who had since left was also a practitioner.  She put a certain amount of pressure on staff to practice too.  Staff meetings sometimes opened with an account of the latest sesshin she’d attended.  It left a bad taste in people’s mouths, and on that basis, people were wary of me until they got to know me a bit.  One said he was glad he got to know me because he thought all Buddhists were like this supervisor.  Let’s be careful out there!

Another side of tolerance is that we can feel the need to downplay the differences between our tradition and other faith traditions in order to get along, and that can sometimes make it difficult to maintain our own conviction that we’ve worked so hard to cultivate.  As we’ve seen, there are various teachings in our tradition that say that once we enter the stream and start to practice, we become convinced that what Buddha is teaching is true, and we see that other approaches to dealing with our suffering are not so effective.  Certainly spiritual and non-spiritual practice that leads to compassion, wisdom, generosity, joy, morality, etc. are great. and we can decide that oh well, all roads lead to the same place.  Yet what the Buddha taught was really pretty radical.  The key here is that there’s a difference between tolerance and endorsement.  We can completely respect the faith and belief of others without watering down our own convictions about zazen, work, study and ritual, and without being dismissive of the real differences in belief between religious traditions.

In a strange way, that’s a form of INtolerance: I can tolerate your religion as long as I dilute the differences and particular elements that are unique and central to your tradition.  Tolerance as middle way isn’t about making all religions the same.  In Buddhism, tolerance is about recognizing that people are different, they have different needs and personalities and experiences, and one approach doesn’t work for everyone.

It’s the same situation we encounter in teachings about skillful means.  Buddha taught differently to different people for the same reasons.  We may be firmly convinced that the Buddha’s dharma is the one complete teaching about reality, but it doesn’t work for everyone.  There are real differences in religious beliefs and they may be profound and not reconcilable.  What they’re trying to achieve is not necessarily liberation from suffering as we understand it, but because as bodhisattvas we try to cultivate good will toward beings, not resent them or try to hinder their practice.  We might not agree with the belief structure, but we can certainly respect movement toward peace and harmony.

We may think our practice is the one true way, and that as bodhisattvas we need to convince everyone to practice like we do for their own good, but is that really skillful means?  Can we tolerate and respect the faith and conviction of others without necessarily endorsing those beliefs, or feeling the need to paper over the differences or dilute the teachings of our own practice?

Notes:

(1) Boundless Vows, Endless Practice, p 4.
​(2) The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. (2011). United States: Tuttle Publishing, p.14.
​(3) The Wholehearted Way, p. 25.
​(4) The Wholehearted Way, p. 190.
​(5) The Wholehearted Way, p. 90.
​(6)  Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 84.
​(7) Boundless Vows, Endless Practice, p 37.
​(8)  Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 255.