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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Yogacara school of Buddhist philosophy, from which our Soto school descends, says that there are four fundamental bonno from which all the other ones spring.  Gachi is ignorance of the nature of the self or ignorance of the three marks of existance (interconnectedness, impermanence and egolessness) as they relate to the self.  We think “I am this body or feeling or perception and anything that isn’t this body or feeling or perception isn’t me.”  We don’t understand that the self can’t exist without relation to others, that it’s subject to change, and that it’s not a fixed and permanent thing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is one other traditional explanation about ringing the bell 108 times.  四苦八苦 shiku hakku is an expression meaning to be in dire distress, or to have difficulty; it represents the sufferings of life.  This phrase has the same sound as 4, 9, 8, 9,  shi ku ha ku.  If you add up 4 times 9 and 8 times 9, it comes out to be 108.  Thus shi ku ha ku (108 bells) helps you get rid of shikuhakku (sufferings of life).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions for reflection and discussion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To summarize:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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