Right means are a gate of Dharma illumination; for they are accompanied by right conduct. 衆生を導く正しい方便は法明門である。それによって衆生は正しい行いを具えるからである。 A more complete translation of this would be something like “Guiding all beings by using proper skillful means results in all beings being equipped or prepared to engage in right conduct or right behavior.” First let’s look at skillful means and then at how that results in right conduct. You may know skillful means as upaya in Sanskrit or hoben 方便 in Japanese. The basic idea is that we can use our own specific methods or techniques that fit the situation in order to move ourselves and others toward awakening. Sometimes teachers need to get our attention or attract us to practice and the dharma, so they may use particular terms or techniques with beginners that they discard later when people are more experienced. For instance, when I talk with the general public I don’t say zazen—no one knows what that means. I say sitting practice or, if I have to, meditation (even though zazen is not meditation). Once people come in the door of the temple and start to practice, they don’t hear about meditation; it’s all zazen. Skillful means can get tricky, because it’s certainly possible to wander away from what Buddha actually taught and convince ourselves that whatever we want to do or say is skillful means. Even though a particular view or teaching is not ultimately “true,” it may still be expedient or helpful—as long as we’re aware that what we’re doing or saying is provisional. The Buddha or teachers and ancestors can teach and lead in this way because they’re deep practitioners with some wisdom and insight. They know how to make use of everything at their disposal in a skillful way in order to reach the audience that’s actually in front of them. They also know how to present complex teachings in simple language, even though what they’re describing frequently can’t really be captured in words. However, this gate is not relevant only to dharma teachers. We as students and practitioners can use the daily things we encounter in this samsaric world to support our own practice, even as we make effort not to cling to or perpetuate them. Nobody likes suffering, but it gets us onto the cushion and gives us some motivation to practice. Maybe we pay attention to dharma books and dharma talks as guides that point us toward awakening even though we know we need to do that work for ourselves; we can’t just read or listen and somehow get it. The practice question for us is: how can we use our delusion to overcome our delusion? Historically, we encounter the idea of upaya or hoben in a couple of related ways. Sometimes it’s been used to critique teachings and schools other than one’s own by saying that those teachings are not the utimate truth, but merely expedient means aimed at an audience that wasn’t able to really comprehend the actual dharma. In addition, the Chinese used upaya as a way to organize and classify the Buddha’s teachings. Each teaching was seen as an expedient way to deal with the shortcomings of the teaching before it, and it also pointed to the more complete teaching that comes after it. Thus there was a progression of teachings from the most basic and simple to the most complex and profound. In any event, skillful means are critical for bodhisattvas. They need the wisdom and compassion to see how to gear a particular teaching to the needs, experience and ability of a particular group of practitioners. The point is to use any expedient means in order to liberate beings from suffering and introduce them to the dharma, whether overtly or more subtly. They’re working with the potential of various different people by speaking and acting according to their specific karmic conditions. In chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra, the Buddha describes how the Avalokitesvara changes his form to meet each person’s needs. He might become a monk, a divine figure or an animal. That’s one kind of bodhisattva skillful means. Sometimes skillful means is used to explain the behavior of “crazy monks” or dharma leaders that do unexpected or puzzling things. Their answers to questions don’t seem to make sense, or they hand you a candle to help you get home in the dark and then blow it out, or maybe they seem to break a lot of precepts even though they’re supposed to be monks. If these things really are being done skillfully, they’re being done to break us out of our habituated thinking and help us see things in a different way. Suddenly having the rug pulled out from under us can open our eyes to the nature of self or the nature of suffering. Of course, the challenge is to know whether behavior that seems eccentric is really upaya or simply a human mistake based on delusion. There two famous metaphors for upaya in the Buddhist tradition. One is the burning house, and the other is the empty fist. The burning house comes from the Lotus Sutra. Buddha describes a father who lives with many sons in a large house that’s crumbling and falling down. It catches fire and the father is doing everything he can to get the sons out, but they’re busy playing and not paying attention. He knows what kinds of toys each of the sons likes, and he tells them that their favorite toys and carts are outside, and they should come and get them while they can. Because these are all the things the sons especially wanted, they all come piling out of the house. Buddha asks Shariputra whether the father was guilty of falsehood, and Shariputra says no—if the lives of the sons were preserved, then they already had a plaything. The father was simply using expedient means to save their lives. It’s an illustration of the Buddha using various kinds of teachings to get people to see that they’re in the burning house of samsara and move them toward liberation. He’s teaching them in the ways that they like best so they can take in what he’s saying. In the sutra the Buddha also explains the three vehicles of Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism as three kinds of expedient means. First, the Buddha preaches the three vehicles to attract and guide living beings, but later he employs just the Great Vehicle to save them. Why? The Tathagata possesses measureless wisdom, power, freedom from fear, the storehouse of the Dharma. He is capable of giving to all living beings the Dharma of the Great Vehicle, but not all of them are capable of receiving it. Shariputra, for this reason you should understand that the Buddhas employ the power of expedient means, and because they do so, they make distinctions in the one Buddha vehicle and preach it as three. In the empty fist metaphor, in order to get the attention of his crying children a father holds up his empty fist, saying there is something inside it. Sometimes he’s holding golden leaves in his fist to give the impression there’s something gold inside. It’s a popular metaphor because emptiness is one of the things we so often have to approach by skillful means, and frequently hear that all teachings are expedient means and are themselves empty of any fixed self-nature. In the beginning we may be afraid of emptiness or decide we’re not interested, so teachers have to get our attention. They have to get us to move from focusing on the thoughts and distractions that arise in our minds to focusing on the ground of those thoughts and distractions. What’s underneath them? How do they arise? How are we grabbing and interacting with them in order to create a self? Thinking there are golden teachings inside the empty fist can attract and motivate us to practice and stop crying like the children, and at some point we understand emptiness and can let go of our delusions and suffering as well as the teachings. We can see beyond gold leaves to the emptiness of the fist itself. While we acknowledge the existence of skillful means, we also have to be careful not to get stuck there. It’s the old finger pointing at the moon and the warning not to mistake the finger for the moon. To go back to the three branches of Buddhism in the Lotus Sutra, Okumura Roshi says: "In Buddhism, skillful means are important. Those different paths are considered to be skillful means to encourage people not to stop practice. Teachers and teachings show a kind of a goal that encourages practice, and when a student reaches that stage, the teacher shows the next goal. That’s the way a student practices with encouragement. That’s the meaning of stages in Buddhist practice, but Dogen Zenji says our practice [of shikantaza] is very unique. He doesn’t use this kind of skillful means." This means practice and awakening are not two, to which we’ll come back in a moment. There are no stages in zazen, with one thing leading to the next. We just sit down and open the hand of thought. The gate statement says that if we use skillful means, then people are prepared to engage in right conduct. What is right conduct, and how do the two elements of this statement work together? Back at Gate 26 we considered dharma conduct—conduct that arises from prajna or wisdom, as opposed to unwholesome conduct driven by the three poisons. Skillful means and right conduct are connected because each one reinforces the other. When we see the universe and ourselves clearly, we act skillfully for the benefit of all beings. That skillful action or right conduct moves us ourselves toward insight into reality and away from suffering. One of Dogen’s most important teachings is that practice and awakening are not two. Without action, awakening is not realized; without wisdom and compassion, our actions are not skillful. Paying attention to what we do and the way we conduct ourselves is necessary in addition to whatever dharma study or other kinds of practice we may be doing. At Gate 26 we saw that right conduct is what happens in the reality of this moment, not an abstract theoretical idea. Our idea about what right conduct is will never match the reality of the circumstances right now that change moment after moment, so our concept of right conduct is not the same as right conduct. Also, we can’t act in the past or in the future, so this moment is the only opportunity for right conduct. When it comes to skillful guidance about ethics and morality, we really need to understand that guidance is helpful, but it’s an idea. Certainly we can discuss good and bad and precepts and guidelines and all of those things, but when the moment comes to act, that's the reality. How do we use skillful means to equip bodhisattvas for right conduct? Those skillful means need to provide guidance on two things: interconnectedness and cause and effect. It’s important to understand interconnectedness from the point of view that what we do affects others, and from the point of view that our suffering or unhappiness is not something “out there” that randomly arrives on our doorstep. It might seem to us that what we do and what others do is disconnected, or that what we do is our own business and no one else should care, or that our actions and the results of our actions are separate. However, it’s difficult to live ethically if we don’t understand that what we do has a bigger footprint than just the consequences for us. If I think that I live and act in isolation, then it doesn’t matter what I do and I don’t worry about any effect on others. Once I see that everything is connected, then naturally I can feel some responsibility to live in a wholesome way and engage in right conduct. The other important piece is cause and effect, and the message is similar: right conduct leads to liberation from suffering, and unwholesome conduct leads to suffering. If we can see clearly and act skillfully, we can keep ourselves out of the hell realms driven by the three poisons, so we have some control over our circumstances and the level of suffering with which we’re dealing. Suffering isn’t something that arrives randomly from somewhere else. Belief in cause and effect is one of the most important teachings in Soto Zen. Dogen addressed it several times in the Shobogenzo. One of his most important points was that we may not see the result of our conduct right away, and it might not look the way we expect. That’s true of our individual day-to-day actions and also for the actions we take as skillful means of guiding others. We do the best we can to guide others to recognize interconnectedness and that actions have outcomes, but we can’t always predict and control what happens as a result of that guidance. Again, this gate applies to us whether we’re dharma teachers or not. As bodhisattvas, our aspiration is always to model right action or right conduct. When we receive precepts or participate in the monthly ryaku fusatsu, we hear the Kyojukaimon, Dogen’s instructions on the precepts. Among other things, it talks about the three pure precepts: embracing moral codes, embracing beneficial actions and embracing all living beings. In the section on embracing beneficial actions, it says that this is itself awakening and that This is the way in which one should practice by oneself and the way in which one should lead others. We’re all responsible for providing guidance about nonseparation and cause and effect all the time, but not necessarily by being dharma teachers or giving formal instruction. Simply doing actions that help other beings is skillful means, and those beneficial actions equip others to take beneficial action themselves. As bodhisattvas we are always demonstrating how to move through the world with wisdom and compassion, not because we’re better than anyone else but because wisdom and compassion are what happens when we see clearly and we’re not pulled around by delusion. Our challenge is to do this in a way that’s not self-conscious: look at me, what a great and inspiring role model I am! For instance, when I used to deploy with the Red Cross for disaster relief during hurricanes or wildfires, I wore a bright red RC reflective vest even when traveling to the site. Sometimes people in the airport would stop me to say thanks or ask about what I do. Frequently they would say they felt inspired to do something in own their communities too as a result. That was precisely why I wore it—to put a service presence into the world and show that it’s possible to participate in this way. I considered it skillful means. Now, I need to not cling to that and write a story about my great self, taking those thanks personally and getting a big head. I don’t know that anyone actually volunteered for anything or gave to the Red Cross. I could have just be an interesting incident in their day. However, I could have prepared someone to take bodhisattva action herself by showing that a person from Indiana is not separate from what’s happening in South Carolina or Oregon, and that the actions of Red Cross workers on the ground, providing meals and beds and medical care, are making a tangible difference. One of our challenges in these modern times is that skillful means can become spiritual technologies that get divorced from the context of the rest of the eightfold path. Once I gave a talk to a Japanese culture class at Purdue, and one of the students asked “how you guys feel about the commercialization of Zen,” meaning things like Buddhas being used as home decorations, or zazen being turned into corporate mindfulness programs. I thought it was quite a perceptive question, and it’s relevant to our topic here. Can something like mindfulness be skillful means if it’s not accompanied by teachings about sila, or ethics? Are we preparing people to be wise and compassionate, or just to be more efficient workers or more focused on themselves? They can learn “mindfulness” from an app or a YouTube video, and one could legitimately argue that at least they’re being exposed to some kind of contemplative practice, and maybe they would never come into a dharma center and would otherwise never be exposed to any kind of dharma. However, using mindfulness to learn to pay attention can make you a better bodhisattva, but without the ethical context and the teachings about wisdom, it can also make you a better assassin! Mindfulness in the Soto Zen tradition is about not forgetting Buddha’s teachings and not forgetting to practice, not about paying attention to your blood pressure. Thus it’s an open question whether this kind of thing is a skillful means that prepares people for right conduct or not. There are also some interesting questions in this gate about sangha building. What do practitioners need to know and know how to do in order to take their practice into the world? How do we equip novices to be good dharma teachers and to use all of their karmic conditions to share the dharma? As Sanshin’s senior dharma teacher, these are questions I think about all the time, but I think they’re also relevant for board members, practice leaders, and for the sangha as a whole. Soto Zen is relatively new in North America, and we’ll need to develop create and flexible answers to these questions while keeping the spirit of our ancestors’ practice alive. Questions for reflection and discussion:
Pursuit of abundant knowledge is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we truly reflect on the form of the Dharma. 多くの教えを求めることは法明門である。それによって物事の真相を正しく悟るからである。 This is the third gate in a row that’s about seeking or pursuing something (求める motomeru). A couple of gates ago, it was the meaning of the dharma. Last time it was prajna. This time it’s abundant knowledge, but this isn’t just any knowledge—it’s teachings. The second half of the gate statement is about truly reflecting on the form of the dharma. The literal translation is "precisely perceiving or understanding the real situation of everything, or the truth of all things." Perceive or understand here is 悟るsatoru, with same root as satori; thus this is the understanding of awakening, not an intellectual understanding. A couple of gates ago, when we talked about the meaning of the dharma, we were talking about dharma in the largest sense—how the universe functions, or how reality works—and we saw that at the core of that was emptiness. This time we’re talking about dharma in the sense of teachings. As we know, there are three kinds of three treasures: manifesting, maintaining and absolute. The kind of dharma we talked about last time was absolute. Now we need to talk about the other two, manifesting and maintaining. We could say that we can’t really pursue dharma in the absolute sense because it’s already here, but with dharma as teachings, we can make some effort to come in contact with them, take them on board and consider them. The manifesting version of the dharma treasure is what Shakyamuni the human teacher actually taught, how he practiced with his own sangha, and how the dharma-as-teachings first manifested in the world. The maintaining version of the dharma treasure is how the teachings are being made available today, not only what we’re reading in sutra books or dharma publications and not only what our teachers are saying, but also how we’re working with those teachings ourselves. What’s our experience and understanding of those teachings? How are we living with them every day and carrying them into the world? When this gate says “abundant teachings,” it’s not kidding. Starting with the teachings that have been written down, there are tons and tons of canonical writings in Buddhism. We don’t have one or two convenient books, like the Bible. The oldest texts are known as the Pali Canon. The things that Buddha said were transmitted orally for several centuries before they was written down. Eventually the sangha got together and decided what teachings were legitimate and valid, and they made three groups of teachings, known as the three baskets or tripitaka: the words of the Buddha (sutras), the words of his close disciples on metaphysics (abhidarma), and monastic regulations (vinaya). Theravada Buddhism looks to this Pali Canon as its set of scriptures, and these alone are abundant. They’re said to fill more than 12,000 pages in about fifty hardbound volumes, taking up about five linear feet of shelf space. Then the Mahayana came along and developed the bodhisattva ideal: everyone should put off his or her own liberation in order to first liberate all beings. That came with its own set of additional teachings and texts, and these were quite different in style and tone from the early ones. Somehow these new texts had to take a legitimate place in the Mahayana canon along with the original Pali Canon, but the Buddha had long since died, so clearly these couldn’t be the actual words of Shakyamuni. Instead, these new texts were said to have been hidden for about 500 years since the time of the Buddha, or that they were the words of Buddha but he had given these teachings in circumstances where they couldn’t have been recorded in the original canon; perhaps he’s in a heavenly realm or in some form other than human. These texts are still called sutras, like the Lotus Sutra or the Prajna Paramita Sutra, but they sound pretty different from the sutras in the Pali Canon. The early sutras are fairly practical and down-to-earth, but the Mahayana sutras are ornate and full of heavenly scenes with various buddhas and bodhisattvas and things magically appearing. They can seem quite devotional and they preach about how to be a bodhisattva and be selfless, compassionate and wise. On top of all those texts, over time various other texts have come to be important to practitioners depending on the sect or dharma family. Of course, all of these texts had to be translated from one language to another as Buddhism moved across the world, and things got changed in those translations. Syncretism happened as Buddhism encountered various new cultures, and skillful teachers emerged who wrote commentaries, manuals and other kinds of texts that provided real help for practice. For instance, when Chan arose in China, koan literature developed, stories of encounters between masters and students. In Soto Zen we think Dogen and his writings and commentaries are important and central to our practice. All of these texts are not sutras, and even the sutras are available in languages other than Buddha’s original language—but we still revere them as the dharma treasure. One of the reasons we have so many teachings and texts that we consider important is the nature of Buddha’s awakening. He didn’t have some magical experience that was reserved only for him; he wasn’t special or chosen. The basis for his teaching was that we are already awake, buddha nature and emptiness are already here, and that each of us has to do our own work to liberate ourselves and others from suffering. If he’s not the recipient of special revelations and all practitioners are already awake, then the teachings of his disciples and their disciples down to modern teachers can be completely legitimate Another reason there are so many teachings is that in the Mahayana the Buddha adapted his message based on the circumstances of his audience. It sometimes seems that he teaches one thing to one group and then says the opposite to another group. That’s explained in the tradition by saying that each group or person needed something different in that moment, but it means that there is a variety of different teachings. Let me just insert a reminder here that it’s fine to read around in the larger Buddhist tradition; there’s certainly plenty of material to work with. However, if you’re feeling confused about what you’re reading and why this doesn’t seem to agree with that, pay attention to the sect, school, time or place of the writer. The reason there are so many schools of Buddhism is that each has a different perspective. That can be very helpful, but if you’re reading about tantric visualization practice and then coming to Sanshin to learn more about it, you won’t be successful. Now related to abundant teachings, of course we have to say a few words about the position that arose within Chan in China that insentient beings preach the dharma. There are myriad insentient beings, and if they’re all preaching the dharma, that’s an even more immeasurable amount of teachings. The traditional Chan story goes that a student asked his teacher, “If the insentient actually possess Buddha nature, can they preach the dharma or not?” The teacher replied, “They preach magnificently, they preach continually, and they preach eternally without a moment’s pause.” Student: “Then why is it that I do not hear it?” Teacher: “Just because you yourself do not hear it, it does not mean that others do not hear it.” Student: “Then who can hear it?” Teacher: “All the sages hear it.” This is a famous story; Dogen and Keizan both wrote about it. It returns us to emptiness as the meaning of the dharma. The point is that when we are standing up in emptiness, we’re not making any distinctions between sentient and insentient, or ordinary people and sages, or anything else. That’s the moment when we see the suchness of each thing we encounter. That suchness or emptiness is the dharma preaching of insentient beings. An object is sitting there completely manifesting suchness without any hindrance or unclarity. The question is, can we hear it preaching the dharma? Can we hear those teachings? If so, then we’re surrounded by abundant teachings in every moment no matter where we are. If we really get that, that’s awakening, and that’s the second part of this gate statement. Again, that precise understanding is satori or awakening. Satori is a term more common in Rinzai than in Soto Zen. It refers to a sudden insight into one’s true nature. Practitioners focus on study, koans and working with a teacher in addition to sitting practice. Everything is aimed at having this kind of breakthrough, but satori is considered only the first step toward fully manifesting buddhahood. One still needs to deepen one’s insight in a lasting and mature way. One is supposed to have many instances of satori, supported by continuing practice. Soto Zen instead simply emphasizes silent illumination, or zazen, and we’re not aiming at any outcome, like a breakthrough or peak experience. Dogen felt that Zen practice was about something larger than attaining a momentary mystical state; in the Zuimonki he wrote: It is said, “Even a thousand acres of clear fields is not as good as a bit of skill that you can take around with you.” The thousand acres of clear fields is the spaciousness we experience when we have that insight into emptiness, but he says that that moment of insight isn’t the endpoint. Seeing the way that Buddha sees isn’t something that happens like a flash of lightning but something that’s happening all the time, so it’s something we can take around with us (in his words). Sometimes these two schools, Rinzai and Soto, are characterized as sudden and gradual, and another way to describe the difference is linear and nonlinear. Rinzai folks are practicing in a step-by-step way toward satori, while Soto folks are experincing that practice and awakening are not two, or practice is itself satori. Sekkei Harada, a modern teacher, wrote something I find helpful: The objective of Zen practice is to graduate as quickly as possible from zazen and return to the time before you knew anything about zazen. Our shikantaza doesn’t have any meaning outside of itself, and zazen, work, study and ritual are interpenetrated in that they are all satori. We don’t have to wait to get on the cushion. We can be receiving abundant teachings and manifesting satori at any time in the midst of any activity or circumstance. All the functions of body, speech and mind are awakening. In any case, satori is about seeing emptiness, which everyone agrees is important. In the world of Soto Zen, satori is the same as bodhi—a state of mind that is fully and accurately aware, as when one is awake rather than asleep or dreaming. To have (or be in the state of) bodhi or satori is to be a buddha, an “awakened one,” free from the delusion (迷 mayoi) that characterizes ordinary living beings. In the broadest possible sense, emptiness or awakening or satori are already here. There’s no need to sit zazen, open the hand, drop off body and mind, spend time with sutras, do mindful work or engage in liturgy. And yet: can we say that in the midst of all that we precisely understand the truth of all things? Most of the time: no! Thus we immerse ourselves in the abundant teachings, whether in the form of dharma study or in the form of dropping our self-involvement so we can hear insentient beings preaching the dharma. In other words, we’re not separate from emptiness, but we usually aren’t aware of that emptiness. In Dogen’s Genjokoan there’s a famous section about a bird’s domain being the sky and a fish’s domain being the water. It’s not possible for them to step outside of their domains to understand them. That’s a description of our life in suchness, emptiness or awakening. We can’t understand emptiness, or the precise truth of all things, by stepping outside of emptiness. We can only understand it by being completely integrated with it. Again, in the broad perspective there’s nothing we need to do—we’re already integrated with the universe—but our limited perception means we don’t see or understand it. An important point here is that that limited perception doesn’t hinder the universal self or emptiness or awakening. Emptiness is going along and functioning just fine no matter what we think or understand. It’s the same with the abundant teachings being preached by insentient beings—as it said in the story I told earlier: “They preach magnificently, they preach continually, and they preach eternally without a moment’s pause.” “Then why is it that I do not hear it?” “Just because you yourself do not hear it, it does not mean that others do not hear it.” We’re already connected with everything that’s going on. We just need to accept that we’re already part of it, Okumura Roshi calls this becoming one piece. It’s true that in the world of form we need to make distinctions. We can’t ignore that or else we can’t function and we just become sort of inert and foolish. We also can’t pay attention only to the world of form, because it’s not the whole story and we just become crazy. This is Uchiyama Roshi’s teaching about the need for balance between wanting to be passive and peaceful and wanting to be active, creative and intellectual. We need to pay attention to teachings about both of these aspects of our lives. Yes, Dogen wrote some elaborate philosophical stuff, but he also wrote instructions about how to brush your teeth and use the toilet. It’s all practice, whether we’re standing, walking, sitting or lying down—and it’s all a source of teachings. Precisely understanding the truth of all things is being free from delusion and the underlying three poisons. It’s giving up attachment to the small self while not negating or annihilating the small self. From the point of view of emptiness, there is no small self and no delusion, so it’s not that these things have disappeared. It’s just that we’ve put boundaries around things in our lives and experience and then separated from them, giving them names and forms and starting to cling to them. Satori is a return to our original condition, where we deeply understand how our perceptions and attachments arise and we see that these things have no substance or self-nature. Ironically, one of the attachments that arises is to the satori experience itself. If you have some kind of opening. you don’t want to let go of it. When it fades, you want to have that experience again. In that way, insight can impede insight. It’s kind of the opposite of using form to transcend form or using the abundant teachings to transcend the abundant teachings. In addition to five skandhas clinging to these limited five skandhas, five skandhas are clinging to emptiness. Bankei was a wandering Zen master in the 17th century, and he said about this: Since your Unborn Buddha Mind hasn’t been realized, you can’t manage smoothly in your daily affairs. In exchanging it for something like “the empty sky,” you’re obscuring the marvelously illuminating Buddha Mind. Since we’re not yet able to see through all our delusions and the stuff that arises from the three poisons, we have suffering in our daily lives. If instead of clinging to forms we cling to the empty sky (satori, non-attachment, emptiness, awakening), we’re just trading one delusion or attachment for another. We can actually become attached to non-attachment. Nonattachment doesn’t mean we don’t have a direction or goals. If we didn’t have some aspiration or vow, we could ignore all these abundant teachings and what they point us to. What’s missing is our preoccupation with the goal while we’re carrying out the activity, whether or not we’ve achieved it. What’s also missing is any effect of this success or failure on our self-esteem. In other words, we’re not using our activity to build our identity. That doesn’t mean we don’t take our practice or our life activities seriously; Dogen even took going to the toilet seriously as practice! Activity is expression of universal self as well as individual self. It doesn’t have or need any meaning or value outside of itself. We’ve seen here that insentient beings are teaching us all the time, but if that’s true, then we ourselves must also be teaching all the time with our activities. It might be that we’re being big brothers and sisters in the dharma for our sangha friends and being good examples and role models of practice, whether that’s in an official or conscious capacity or not. It might also be that the teaching and learning that’s happening is between ourselves and ourselves. Simply paying attention to our own behaviors and what we do skillfully or unskillfully is a hugely abundant source of teachings! If we’re listening, we’re preaching to ourselves all the time. Sometimes those teachings are hard to hear, but our job as bodhisattvas is not to look away. Our own day to day lives are full of abundant teachings. Whether inside or outside of formal practice, we have myriad opportunities to precisely understand the truth of all things. I’m going to leave you with a fun bit of writing by David Llano, a debater who compares a more linear, Rinzai-style debate style with a more nonlinear Soto-style debate style. (Unfortunately, the original post is no longer available online.) He describes the usual logical way that folks prepare for debate; they move from inspiration to inspiration, maybe looking for inside information on the right trick or strategy they need to win: Perhaps if you are nice enough, or lucky, or attractive, one of the enlightened masters will take you aside and confer upon you the transmission of the secret truths that will bring you enlightenment. They will help you figure out the trick to it, and you can one day, in one round, in one speech hit satori and the debate world will crack like an egg. This writer compares that with what he calls the Soto style: Soto debate is a bit rarer. This is the practitioner who sees little distinction between being a “good debater” and being a “human.” The practice bleeds into daily life, and daily life bleeds into the practice. They of course admire the success of the skilled, but recognize it was not because of a moment of satori that success was achieved. Daily sitting, daily “work” on debate was essential. When you are sitting Zazen, you are doing Zen, which means you are practicing it. There’s nothing more to do. When you debate, you are a debater, whether you make bad arguments or not. You are a practitioner. Debating is not an instrumentality, it is the goal. When you debate, you debate. You are not trying to open up something, it’s open. You opened it. This is the Soto approach. Questions for reflection and discussion
Love of Dharma illumination is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we attain Dharma illumination. 法の智慧を求めることは法明門である。それによって法の智慧を得るからである。 This is a mouthful and it doesn’t seem to say much. We’ve got three things being translated as “dharma illumination,” but the kanji for these are not the same. Two of them are actually the “prajna or wisdom of the dharma” rather than “love” of dharma illumination; the word actually means seeking or pursuing (求める motomeru). Last week we considered our aspiration to understand the meaning of the dharma, which is related to emptiness. This week we’re talking about our aspiration for prajna, which is also related to emptiness, so we get to talk about what prajna is and how we seek it. One of the most basic elements of Buddha’s teaching is the Eightfold path, and that’s where we as practitioners probably first encountered teachings about prajna. In the Sutta-Nipata, among the earliest Buddhist scriptures, Buddha says “One who possesses the strength of wisdom, born of the moral precepts and restraints, who is tranquil in mind and delights in meditation, who is mindful, free from attachment, free from fallowness of mind and intoxicants, is called a sage by the wise.” He’s describing the three parts of the eightfold path, or three aspects of our practice, wisdom (prajna), precepts (sila), and meditation (samadhi). All Buddhist traditions have these three elements. The prajna section of the eightfold path includes right understanding or right view and right intention. In early Buddhist teachings, this is a linear path that starts with leading an ethical life so we can sit properly and gain insight or wisdom. Zen and Mahayana in general sees this not as one thing leading to another but as all elements arising together and being practiced together, so we can pull out the prajna elements and talk about them, but it’s not that we’re practicing in order to someday attain prajna. We’ve frequently heard Dogen’s teaching that practice and awakening are not two. Right Understanding means we understand what Buddha taught about the nature of suffering and delusion. That pretty much encompasses everything else: emptiness, impermanence, no self, interconnection, three poisons, etc. It all comes back to the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. Being ignorant about how this one unified reality actually works is the source of all our delusion and suffering, and the flip side is that when we do understand what Buddha was teaching, our own suffering doesn’t arise and we don’t perpetuate suffering for other beings. Right Intention is sometimes called Right Thought because the next two elements of the path are Right Speech and Right Action, and body, speech, mind are the three things we use to create karma. Right understanding and right intention arise together because when we see ourselves and the universe clearly, we don’t get caught up in delusive thinking. Our motivation moves away from gratifying the craving and aversion of the small self and toward doing what’s wholesome for all beings. Within the eightfold path, understanding and intention are prajna. According to Dogen, seeking after prajna means doing zazen. He says it’s nothing other than dropping off body and mind, sitting in zazen, opening the hand of thought, not clinging to ideas about anything, just being there without any separation from rest of the universe. Prajna is what’s there when we let go of thoughts and get out of the way. Of course, one of the places we most frequently encounter prajna is in the first line of the Heart Sutra: “Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, when deeply practicing prajna paramita, clearly saw that all five aggregates are empty and thus relieved all suffering.” Dogen wrote about this line in Shobogenzo Makahannya Haramitsu. He says that not only is clear seeing itself prajna, the five aggregates are the five-fold prajna. Then he says that the six senses coming into contact with the world and giving rise to perceptions are 18 instances of prajna. The four noble truths are four instances of prajna, the paramitas are six instances of prajna, and he goes on to say that various other lists are all instances of prajna. Where the Heart Sutra goes through a list of things and seems to say that they don’t really exist, Dogen says they’re all prajna—and here’s where we come back to emptiness. Again, quick review: emptiness, suchness or thusness is the teaching that no conditioned things have a separate or permanent self-nature. There is nothing we can point to in anything we encounter and say, There! That’s the unchanging, essential nature of that thing! There is emptiness because there is impermanence and interconnectedness; everything is changing all the time and there’s no real separation between one thing and another, so nothing has a separate or permanent self-nature. Prajna is about seeing emptiness. How do we seek prajna, or learn to understand emptiness? Okumura Roshi says: Zazen itself is prajna—seeing the emptiness of all things as they are, without our mind’s incomplete map of the world. In the first sentence of the Heart Sutra. we can clearly see that prajna is something to practice. It is not a technique for using our brain. In this practice of prajna, we have no subject and no object. Everything is just as it is. Avalokitesvara is nothing other than the five aggregates. Five aggregates see the five aggregates as empty. Avalokitesvara sees himself as empty. Aspiring for prajna means we study ourselves and the universe both by getting on the cushion and by carrying out the other activities of the eightfold path. In other words, zazen, work, study and ritual are all gateways to prajna. They’re not actually separate things. We have to be careful about thinking that prajna is a special mystical thing available only to magical Buddhas or locked up in books is a library somewhere. We can’t get it from somebody or learn it by studying Dogen texts or Okumura Roshi’s writings or anything else. It’s very much about what we’re doing while living this moment. Kodo Sawaki says in Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo, “By seizing the sword of wisdom with its prajna point and diamond flame, we seize life afresh, authentic life, life at face value, here and now.” He’s evoking the image of Manjusri here, the bodhisattva that represents wisdom. Prajna isn’t intellectial wisdom that we get from memorizing stuff; just like emptiness, it’s not anywhere other than here and now and it’s not being practiced by beings other than us. This is what it is to be a bodhisattva, manifesting prajna moment by moment. Our dharma cousin Tonen O’Connor has also written about this: We tend to think of [bodhisattvas] as magnificent beings, nearly as awe inspiring as buddhas and remote from our confused lives, forgetting that the definition of a bodhisattva is someone who has generated the aspiration to achieve enlightenment for the sake of all beings. We become bodhisattvas the instant our hearts and minds open to our interconnectedness with all beings and the aspiration rises in us to free all beings from the conditions that constrict their realization of the full possibilities of their lives. Here again we have Right Understanding and Right Intention. As soon as we understand the realities of interconnectedness, our intention or vow is to free all beings from suffering. This is nothing other than the arising and manifestation of prajna, and it’s something we’re actually doing all the time. Tonen goes on: Bodhisattva-hood begins with a response that takes us beyond the confines of our self. In that moment we step onto the Path, although of course not as perfected bodhisattvas approaching the wisdom and compassion of buddhas, but more likely as “not sure I know what I’m doing” bodhisattvas, “falling down and getting up” bodhisattvas, “stumbling along” bodhisattvas. But bodhisattvas nevertheless, aspiring to enlightenment for the sake of all beings. So it is us the Heart Sutra is pointing to when it says bodhisattvas “rely on prajna paramita and thereby attain unsurpassed, complete, perfect enlightenment.” To rely on prajna means it’s something that’s already here. As Tonen says, we’re not perfect, or as Okumura Roshi would say, we’re baby bodhisattvas. Nonetheless, when we have that first glimpse of what the Buddha was teaching, prajna is there, and based on that prajna, we want to practice and keep going. We’re aspiring toward prajna at the same time that we’re already relying on it. Then our job is to actualize this already-existing prajna. One way is sitting zazen without grasping for any result. As Uchiyama Roshi says in Dogen Zen as Religion, “In zazen which actualizes prajna, there should be mushotoku (no gaining)” However, everything we do with compassion and wisdom is really a manifestation of prajna. When Dogen writes about the Heart Sutra, he says that Avalokitesvara is practicing prajna with the whole body. It isn’t enough just to have an intellectual kind of wisdom. It’s also not enough just to have some feeling of compassion. Prajna actively uses the mind and heart and entire body for actualization in the world. Okumura Roshi says, To see things as they are without discrimination is prajna. Avalokiteshvara clearly sees the reality of all beings without discrimination and performs skillful means to help each and every being. This is the functioning of wisdom that is compassionate activities. This is related to what Tonen was saying—as soon as we see interconnectedness, we understand that we need to help all beings and in that moment we become bodhisattvas. That compassionate action is wisdom or prajna. If prajna is seeing with the eyes of Buddha, seeing everything without discrimination and seeing that everything is empty, then there should be myriad opportunities in a day to actualize prajna . . . and, of course, there are. One example is at mealtime. In a formal meal, we chant May we realize the emptiness of the three wheels: giver, receiver and gift. It’s just another way to talk about prajna. There’s the earth and the right causes and conditions, somebody grew the food, or processed it or bought it or cooked it and put it on the table—all that is the piece about the giver. Then there’s you and your family or friends, accepting the food as a way to support your practice—that’s the receiver. The food and everything that went into making the meal possible is the gift. With prajna we recognize that all three wheels, giver, receiver and gift, are empty of any fixed self-nature, and so we let go of our craving and aversion and the three poisons. Okumura Roshi says: We should practice giving or dana without attachment to this person or to that person or to that thing given. That is called the emptiness of the three wheels. That is the way when you practice dana-paramita. In order to practice dana-paramita, we need wisdom or prajna-paramita, which sees the emptiness of self, other people, and the things given. We can see how wisdom and compassion arise together and are necessary for each other. In order to be generous, we need to understand emptiness. As long as our practise is based on three poisons, we have ignorance, particularly ignorance about the emptiness of everything and all beings. Without prajna, we have attachment and craving and clinging. When we see emptiness, we’re released from attachment and new craving doesn’t arise. Within our prajna we see that there is nothing to which we can become attached. When that happens in zazen, it’s shikantaza, or just sitting with nothing extra, but that’s not the only place to actualize prajna. Any time we’re able to see all sides of reality in the midst of what we’re doing, we’re actualizing prajna. When we do that, then samsara and nirvana are really the same. We’re practicing with this limited body and mind and with our limited understanding as part of the human condition, but at the same time prajna and emptiness and the complete functioning of the universe are there. This sameness of samsara and nirvana is one of the most important teachings of the prajna paramita literature. The Heart Sutra seems to be negating all of Buddha’s teaching. There’s no four noble truths or eightfold path or twelve-fold chain of dependent origination. It’s saying that even those teachings are empty, and we can’t cling even to what Buddha said. When we see that, that’s prajna. If we can do what Avalokitesvara is doing in this sutra—seeing that we ourselves are empty—we’re practicing prajna paramita. We see that we’re nothing more than five skandhas, and that somehow this impermanent collection of skandhas tends to cling to the idea that it’s a permanent thing, and that’s where our suffering begins. We see impermanence, we see that there is no fixed self, and we see that ignoring all that leads to suffering. One of the most important sources on prajna is the prajna paramita sutras, of which there are about 40; these are some of the earliest Mahayana texts. One of the sutras says a bodhisattva is a being that experiences everything without attachment and sees reality or suchness. The practice of prajna is central to the nature of the bodhisattva and it comes down to five skandhas not attaching to five skandhas. Aspiring toward prajna and taking bodhisattva vows are same. Prajna is the basis for how we liberate all beings, and as we’ll see a bit later it’s the basis for being a Buddha. There’s an image in the eight-thousand line sutra that I particularly like. The bodhsattva stands in emptiness by not standing on anything, whether conditioned or unconditioned. In other words, when the bodhisattva relies on prajna paramita, he or she is not relying on anything. The sutra goes on to say that bodhisattvas wander without a home, or without attaching to the ideas and stories humans usually write based on what comes in through the senses, and on that basis don’t set themselves up for suffering. Those ideas and stories, by the way, include things like “form and emptiness are not two” and “there is no fixed self nature” and “now I’m practicing prajna.” All those things are important teachings, but the bodhisattva doesn’t stand even on those and doesn’t make a home even there. As soon as we find ourselves grasping something--Oh! Wait! Open the hand and move on. It’s like we’re reminding ourselves not to play favorites, to see each thing without discrimination, to have compassion and wisdom for everything equally, and see everything clearly, not just those things with which we want to spend our time. Sometimes we hear prajna referred to as the mother of all buddhas. Why? Because you have to see all things with the eye of prajna in order to manifest buddha nature. Prajna is the basis for all buddhas. From the point of view of prajna, we treat everything as our children. This is how Buddha sees us; we’re all Buddha’s children. Ideally, parents don’t favor one child over another. They have wisdom and compassion for them all equally. In fact, the sutras say things like “Prajñāpāramitā itself sees all the dharmas and discerns their true nature. As a result of this great merit, it is called Mother.” Prajna and buddhas actually arise together, because you need the wisdom eye to be a Buddha, and when you’re a Buddha you see everything with the wisdom eye as a matter of course. Thus the practice of prajna is not a way to get to something else. We don’t practice wisdom in order to get smarter or become people we like better or get something called awakening or enlightenment. Practicing prajna is a description of how we live when we’re completely standing up in emptiness. It’s like the precepts being a description of a life of awakening rather than a list of dos and don’ts. The point of the Heart Sutra is to keep us from getting stuck anywhere, like wanting to get something out of our practice or wanting to cling to the teachings and use them as a permanent yardstick to measure our experiences and actions. Even Buddha’s teachings aren’t the whole story. Whatever he says is only a part of complete working of universe. By the time he says it, or you read it, the whole universe has moved on, so clinging to anything, even dharma teachings, is a problem. You want to grasp form, feeling, perception, formation, consciousness? In emptiness, they don’t exist. You want to grasp what comes in through your senses? That stuff doesn’t exist either. You want to grasp the four noble truths and the eightfold path? Nope. Anything you want to pick up—prajna says put it down. Don’t deny it, don’t reject it, don’t separate from it, don’t ignore it, don’t supress it—but don’t carry it around, or stand on it and think that it’s firm ground. In zazen we get to see how that kind of mind feels. What does it feel like when we stop bouncing from one shiny toy to the next? What does it feel like just to rest in what’s sometimes called choiceless awareness? Usually we don’t have that luxury. Our aspiration for prajna or wisdom is not about acquiring knowledge or experience or anything we don’t already have. It’s about letting go of the stuff that gets in the way. In order to get through this gate, we have to put down all the extra baggage we’re carrying and leave it at the side of the road. Otherwise, we miss the gate even though it’s right in front of us. Questions for reflection and discussion
Enjoyment of the meaning of the Dharma is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we seek the meaning of the Dharma. 法の道理を願うことは法明門である。それは法の道理を求めることだからである。 We need to look closely here at “the meaning of the dharma.” 道理 (dori) translated here as “meaning” is actually reason, logic, or sense. 道 (do) is “way” and 理 (ri) is the same word as the one in ri and ji (事), or absolute and relative. Thus we have something like “the absolute way of the dharma” or “the logic or principle of the dharma.” Negau (願う), translated here as “enjoyment.” actually means to desire or wish for, but the sense is to pray for. Negau shows up all the time in Japanese ekos using the form negawaku. In English ekos we usually say “May such-and-so happen” but Sotoshu translations might say “What we pray for is such-and-so.” Rather than a small-self thirsting desire, this is a larger spiritual aspiration. We should also take a moment to consider the term “dharma.” One meaning is what the Buddha taught—what got recorded in sutras and what teachers like Dogen had to say about the content of Buddha’s teachings. Another meaning is reality, or the way the universe works. The Buddha said that the dharma is always here, whether or not there is a buddha to preach it or a sangha to study it. It’s the true functioning of our lives, whether we like it, expect it, understand it or not. Let’s put this all together. Instead of “enjoyment of the meaning of the dharma,” we might say “aspiring for the reason or logic of the dharma.” In other words, we want to deeply understand how the universe actually works: how the parts fit together, how karmic circumstances unfold, how this one unified reality makes sense. That sounds a lot like bodhicitta. Arousing the mind of awakening makes us want to investigate the lives of the individual self and the universal self, or the self without relation to others that includes everything, that make up this one unified reality. In section 7 of the Genjokoan, Dogen says, “When a person first seeks after the dharma, the person becomes far from the boundary of the dharma. When the dharma is correctly transmitted to the self, the person is immediately an original person.” This whole “seeking after the dharma” thing immediately raises some difficulty. It means we want something and we’re running after it. We think that’s good and OK because it’s the dharma, and yet we keep hearing that craving and aversion or chasing and escaping are the most basic roots of our suffering. We’re far from the boundary of the dharma. Isn’t there a direct conflict between this gate and the teachings about opening the hand and non-attachment? Here’s what Okumura Roshi says: I think that for most of is, we begin to practice in order to fill some emptiness, or to recover from some sort of unhealthy life. We call this aspiration in Buddhist terms bodhicitta, or bodaishin in Japanese, which is often translated into English as bodhi-mind, awakening mind or way-seeking mind. Isn’t this another kind of desire? Yes, it is. Only the object has changed. We feel sick of living seeking after money, fame, status, etc. and we start to look for something spiritual, in our case Buddhism or enlightenment, liberation or nirvana. Without such desire, we don’t have any motivation for a spiritual search. He goes on to say that in this quote from the Genjokoan, Dogen points out that in the beginning of our practice we’re still trying to fill a gap, still practicing with a greedy mind. The motivation to practice becomes the obstacle to practice. Can we practice without desire for practice? If we can do that, then we’re really just sitting, and it’s not “we” who are sitting—the universe is carrying out practice through our bodies and minds. This is where we get to understand the logic or principle of the dharma that this gate is talking about. Bodai-shin or bodhicitta is the mind seeking awakening. It can also be interpreted as the mind that is awake, the mind that aspires to live in accordance with reality instead of being pulled by egocentric desires that work against it. This is the mind that’s not practicing in order to get something for the small self, like stress reduction or spiritual powers. Dogen says in Shobogenzo-Hotsu-bodai-shin (Arousing Bodhi-Mind), “To arouse bodhi-mind is to vow to save others before oneself, and to actually work to fulfill the vow.” If the mind is truly awake and we really understand the nature of reality, then that vow arises naturally and our focus is on all beings, not just ourselves. Thus the search for the dharma, or we could say the search for meaning, is a very natural part of the human condition. It touches on at least two of the components of spiritual health: a balance/integration between individual/universe or self/whole, and a sense of purpose in life and that life has meaning. However, there are two distinct but related searches going on here. The search for the dharma is about understanding how reality actually works, seeing it clearly in its entirety, not leaving things out and not adding in anything extra. Practice is about seeing with the eyes of prajna. The other search is centered on the question of why our lives matter. What’s the role of our individual selves within the universal self? Is there any point to our getting out of bed in the morning? Okumura Roshi says, Our problems begin when we follow our natural human tendency to look for meaning in our activities. We usually don’t do anything without knowing the point of that action. We ask ourselves what the outcome is, why it’s important, how others are affected and whether or not there’s a benefit for us. By extension, we look for the meaning of our lives. I think these two searches are connected, the search for dharma and the search for personal meaning in our lives. If we understand nature of reality, we understand nature of self. Why is something significant, and what’s the context for that? Bodai-shin, the mind that is awake, says: I know there’s something bigger than me, and I want to know more about that. So, is there any point to our getting out of bed in the morning? The answer is yes, because when we get out of bed, the whole universe gets out of bed. We don’t get up just for ourselves, we get up for the whole universe and all the beings in it. When we feel like that’s a tall order—living on behalf of all beings—we can remember that all beings are also living on behalf of us. All beings are getting out of bed in the morning for us, too. There’s no point at which beings are cut off from each other. We can choose to ignore that connection, but that doesn’t make it go away. The point of our lives, or the meaning of our lives, is that we’re bodhisattvas and we were so from the day we were born. Our lives had a point the moment five skandhas took this human form, so we don’t have to worry about not having a place in the universe or something to contribute; those things are already there. That doesn’t mean we understand how that works or how to do it skillfully, with wisdom and compassion, and for that, the practice of aspiring for the reason or sense of the dharma is helpful. How do we investigate our questions so the dharma begins to make sense to us? We engage in the four aspects to our practice here at Sanshin: zazen, work, study and ritual. Zazen is how we come to understand the meaning of the dharma by sitting down and dropping off all the many ways we create separation: by labeling and making distinctions between self and others, and by clinging to our ideas about reality rather than being in touch with actual reality. Instead we let down all the barriers and just let everything in. As Dogen says in the Genjokoan, “Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice/enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice/enlightenment through the self is realization.” We’re just sitting right in the middle of it all and experiencing being personally intimate with the universe. There was a time in his life when Okumura Roshi himself had questions about meaning. As a student, he wondered about societal expectations that everyone would do well in school, get good jobs, make money and buy impressive things. He questioned the value of competition for wealth, power, fame and luxury. Was this really a useful measure of what was good and what was not? He read all kinds of things looking for answers, but Whatever I read seemed to be one person’s idea from his limited experiences in a certain time and society. I wanted to know the meaning of meaning. Then he encountered Sawaki Roshi’s teaching that To stop looking for meaning and simply do good-for-nothing zazen seems like liberation from that endless circle of a dog chasing its tail. We don’t look for meaning in our zazen or ask why we do it. We just drop the barriers and let go of thoughts and questions. Then there’s work. That’s one way we investigate the meaning of the dharma with our activity. At Sanshin, work practice is not just volunteer work at the temple, but the actual practice of balancing action and stillness, and of coming to understand the interconnected nature of community. In a way, we’re doing the same thing we’re doing in zazen, dropping off body and mind in the midst of completely engaging in what we’re doing. We can also observe the teachings in a concrete way. If my job is growing vegetables, I see that they change over time, that they depend on seeds and soil conditions, and that they’re connected to other things around them, and all these things are also true of me. We also come to understand how the universe works through dharma study. In Section 10 of his Gakudo-Yojinshu, Dogen said, “There are two things for determining how to settle the body-mind; one is studying with a teacher and listening to the dharma, and the other is putting our energy into zazen. Hearing the dharma allows our minds to disport freely; zazen uses practice and verification just as we use right and left hands. Therefore, to enter the buddha-way, we should not discard either [practice or verification]. If we do, we will never accept [the buddha-way].” Sawaki Roshi apparently summarized this section as meaning that we have to understand our practice and practice our understanding. While it might seem that we engage in zazen for the sake of making sense of opaque texts taken up in dharma study, it’s actually the opposite. We undertake dharma study in order to understand the nature of zazen. Study alone isn’t enough—we have to put in time on the cushion—but without the guidance of teachers and ancestors, we’re apt to come up with our own ideas about what zazen is and go off the rails. Finally, there’s ritual. While work is an active engagement with the community in this time and place, ritual is an active engagement with the community across space and time. Chanting texts integrates them deeply into ourselves just as has happened for Soto Zen practitioners across the centuries, and like the movements of work, the choreography of form and liturgy are concrete experiences of the dharma. Our approach to ritual at Sanshin is to investigate it thoroughly with body and mind such that we’re not merely going through the motions because the calendar says it’s time to do a ceremony or we’re attached to giving an exotic performance. We do everything we need to do, including elaborate rituals when they’re appropriate and meaningful, but nothing more. Maybe you know this famous story about Bodhidharma. Shortly after arriving in China from India, he visited Emperor Wu. “What is the meaning of the dharma?” the emperor asked. “Vast emptiness without holiness,” Bodhidharma replied. “Who is standing before me now?” “I don’t know.” According to Bodhidharma, the whole point of this aspiration for understanding the universe is to understand emptiness. Everything else makes sense and falls into place if we just get that piece, because so many other teachings are related to it. Emptiness, suchness or thusness is the teaching that no conditioned things have a separate or permanent self-nature. There is nothing we can point to in anything we encounter and say, There! That’s the unchanging, essential nature of that thing! Emptiness is basic to our practice and our understanding of everything we encounter. It’s connected to the three marks of existence, the three characteristics of all conditioned things: Impermanence: Everything arises because of causes and conditions; nothing arises from nothing. Those causes and conditions are changing all the time, so whatever arises from them also has to be changing all the time. Without a fixed, permanent self-nature because of impermanence, everything is empty. The very experience of deeply seeing imperanence is directly related to our aspiration for the meaning of the dharma. Here’s how Tairyu Tsunoda, a teacher at Komazawa University, describes it: When one truly sees into the flux of arising and disppearing, the self-centered mind does not arise, thoughts of seeking fame and profit cease, and the mind the seeks the Way of Buddha arises. For this reason, when this mind that seeks enlightenment -- the mind that sees into the transient nature of the world, the mind the seeks the way -- arises, we become free from the selfish, egocentric mind, the mind which seeks fame and profit. We are then alarmed n the extremely quick passage of time. Without wasting any tie, we practice as if we were batting away flames enveloping our head and hair. We devote ourselves to the practice, reflecting on the uncertainty and fragility of our bodies and lives. Our aspiration to understand the dharma supports our seeing impermanence, or seeing with wisdom or with Buddha’s eyes; seeing impermanence reinforces our aspiration to practice and understand the meaning of the dharma. No-self: Even though we think we are individuals who are identifiable as ourselves and stay the same throughout our lives, there’s nothing we can point to and say: There! That’s me! Our bodies and minds are changing all the time. We aren’t separate from all the other beings and things in the universe or from reality or Buddha’s way. There’s just this constantly shifting pile of five skandhas to which we give a name and a story. However, that’s just five skandhas clinging to five skandhas. Without a separate, permanent self-nature, even the self is empty. Suffering, unease or unsatisfactoriness: Because of emptiness, we can’t use conditioned things to make ourselves happy and comfortable in the long term. Those things will change or go away because of impermanence, and there is no self that we need to shore up by chasing and grasping things. Much as we might like to deny emptiness and the three marks, when we do, we set ourselves up for suffering because that’s not how the world actually is. There’s also a connection to interconnectedness: within this one unified reality, nothing can be separate because there’s nothing outside the Buddha way. If everything is interconnected, then we can’t draw a boundary between this thing and that thing and say this is the self-nature of this thing which is different from the self-nature of that thing. It’s like saying the right hand and the left hand somehow have different self natures even though they’re part of the same body. Without a separate self-nature because of interconnectedness, everything is empty. Thus Bodhidharma says that if we really understand that all of existence is empty and why it’s empty, we understand the workings of the dharma. Take anything else our teachers are telling us, and you can relate it to these teachings about emptiness and the three marks of existence. How about the Four Noble Truths and the nature of suffering? When we deny the three marks of existence, we suffer because reality doesn’t actually work that way. We don’t want to believe that things are impermanent or interconnected and we don’t want to believe that we aren’t a “self,” but the universe doesn’t care what we think—it’s going along, doing what it does anyway, and we get a bad surprise. How about the precepts? Mahayana precepts are a description of how we live when we understand emptiness. They’re not actually rules or guidelines, and we have no urge to break them when we really see how the universe works. How about Dogen’s main teachings, for example: practice and awakening are not two? It’s our understanding of emptiness that allows us to manifest our buddha nature or inherent awakening. We don’t need to go out and acquire these things; they’re already here and we don’t get them by practicing. However, when we practice based on understanding emptiness, we immediately manifest awakening without the hindrances of delusion. Practice and awakening are not two. Emptiness is key to our aspiration to understand how the universe makes logical sense. Some Westerners come to Buddhism because if feels scientific. It seems systematic and logical, and it is. Yet Buddhism doesn’t deny that we are also emotional beings. We appreciate friendship and art and chocolate cake. We get upset when a loved one dies or we lose a job. We see things around us that make us feel annoyed or grateful. Here’s the thing: the dharma can make sense of all of that stuff too. Our practice lets us see what’s really happening in our moment to moment experience so we don’t get hijacked or feel like we’re being hit by a tsunami. We can make some plan for skillful action and have some confidence that we can carry it out. We can make bodhisattva vows to liberate all beings from suffering and have some insight into how that suffering arises and what we can do about it. If we aspire to seek out the meaning of the dharma, we’re on the way to being better bodhisattvas. Questions for reflection and discussion
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About the text The Ippyakuhachi Homyomon, or 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination, appears as the 11th fascicle of the 12 fascicle version of Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo. Dogen didn't compile the list himself; it's mostly a long quote from another text called the Sutra of Collected Past Deeds of the Buddha. Dogen wrote a final paragraph recommending that we investigate these gates thoroughly. Hoko has been talking about the gates one by one since 2016. She provides material here that can be used by weekly dharma discussion groups as well as for individual study. The 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination
[1] Right belief [2] Pure mind [3] Delight [4] Love and cheerfulness The three forms of behavior [5] Right conduct of the actions of the body [6] Pure conduct of the actions of the mouth [7] Pure conduct of the actions of the mind The six kinds of mindfulness [8] Mindfulness of Buddha [9] Mindfulness of Dharma [10] Mindfulness of Sangha [11] Mindfulness of generosity [12] Mindfulness of precepts [13] Mindfulness of the heavens The four Brahmaviharas [14] Benevolence [15] Compassion [16] Joy [17] Abandonment The four dharma seals [18] Reflection on inconstancy [19] Reflection on suffering [20] Reflection on there being no self [21] Reflection on stillness [22] Repentance [23] Humility [24] Veracity [25] Truth [26] Dharma conduct [27] The Three Devotions [28] Recognition of kindness [29] Repayment of kindness [30] No self-deception [31] To work for living beings [32] To work for the Dharma [33] Awareness of time [34] Inhibition of self-conceit [35] The nonarising of ill-will [36] Being without hindrances [37] Belief and understanding [38] Reflection on impurity [39] Not to quarrel [40] Not being foolish [41] Enjoyment of the meaning of the Dharma [42] Love of Dharma illumination [43] Pursuit of abundant knowledge [44] Right means [45] Knowledge of names and forms [46] The view to expiate causes [47] The mind without enmity and intimacy [48] Hidden expedient means [49] Equality of all elements [50] The sense organs [51] Realization of nonappearance The elements of bodhi: The four abodes of mindfulness [52] The body as an abode of mindfulness [53] Feeling as an abode of mindfulness [54] Mind as an abode of mindfulness [55] The Dharma as an abode of mindfulness [56] The four right exertions [57] The four bases of mystical power The five faculties [58] The faculty of belief [59] The faculty of effort [60] The faculty of mindfulness [61] The faculty of balance [62] The faculty of wisdom The five powers [63] The power of belief [64] The power of effort [65] The power of mindfulness [66] The power of balance [67] The power of wisdom [68] Mindfulness, as a part of the state of truth [69] Examination of Dharma, as a part of the state of truth [70] Effort, as a part of the state of truth [71] Enjoyment, as a part of the state of truth [72] Entrustment as a part of the state of truth [73] The balanced state, as a part of the state of truth [74] Abandonment, as a part of the state of truth The Eightfold Path [75] Right view [76] Right discrimination [77] Right speech [78] Right action [79] Right livelihood [80] Right practice [81] Right mindfulness [82] Right balanced state [83] The bodhi-mind [84] Reliance [85] Right belief [86] Development The six paramitas [87] The dāna pāramitā [88] The precepts pāramitā [89] The forbearance pāramitā. [90] The diligence pāramitā [91] The dhyāna pāramitā [92] The wisdom pāramitā [93] Expedient means [94] The four elements of sociability [95] To teach and guide living beings [96] Acceptance of the right Dharma [97] Accretion of happiness [98] The practice of the balanced state of dhyāna [99] Stillness [100] The wisdom view [101] Entry into the state of unrestricted speech [102] Entry into all conduct [103] Accomplishment of the state of dhāraṇī [104] Attainment of the state of unrestricted speech [105] Endurance of obedient following [106] Attainment of realization of the Dharma of nonappearance [107] The state beyond regressing and straying [108] The wisdom that leads us from one state to another state and, somehow, one more: [109] The state in which water is sprinkled on the head Archives
November 2024
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