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Reflection on there being no self is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not taintedly attach to self. 無我觀是法明門、不染著我故. This week we take up the next of the four dharma seals: no-self. Our gate statement is telling us is that if we look closely at the nature of self, we will see that there is no fixed, permanent self and on that basis we will loosen our attachment to our ideas about what it is. There’s nothing there that we can grasp and hang onto, and if we think so, that’s delusion (this gate uses “taint”). Understanding the attachment to self is really important in our tradition. The Japanese word bonno 煩悩 refers to our delusive desires, things that drive us to take unwholesome action. The second bodhisattva vow, bonno mu jin sei gan dan 煩惱無盡誓願斷 (delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them) includes the same bonno. There are four kinds of bonno or basic delusions: - gachi: ignorance of the dharma - gaken: egocentric views based on our ignorance - gamon: arrogance - ga-ai: attachment to self Not understanding no-self is one of the most basic delusions we have. It’s at the root of a lot of our suffering. If I think the self is permanent, I need to make sure it’s as good as or better than all the other selves around. This fiction of a self becomes a yardstick for measuring my life—but that makes no sense, because there really is no yardstick and nothing to measure. So why do we say that there is no self? After all, we encounter a variety of people every day. We’ve seen each other here before, we recognize each other and remember things we’ve done together. However, the teaching of no-self doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to have personalities or some particular characteristics. Teachings about no-self are not saying that we as individuals don’t exist. Buddha taught that the self is simply a collection of elements that come together in this moment based on causes and conditions. Causes and conditions are always changing because all things are impermanent; therefore the things that arise from causes and conditions are also impermanent, and there’s nothing we can point to as a self that persists in a fixed way through time. Because everything arises from causes and conditions, nothing has an independent existance. Everything, including the self, is dependent on other things. It doesn’t arise from nothing or exist independently. We might think we’re separate from all other beings or dharmas, but we can’t be. If that’s true, then where is the boundary between self and other? I’m here today because my ancestors got on boats from various European countries and came to the US. Myriad workers over the last 62 years have grown my food and sold me stuff and treated my illnesses. Japanese Zen teachers left Asia and brought practice to North America and made it possible for me to practice. I’m here in this moment exactly like this because of all of these people. They’re part of the causes and conditions of this moment for me. So where is the boundary between my life and theirs? Where is the self? It truly doesn’t exist. At the same time, it’s also true that we inhabit individual bodies and have individual experiences, skills and interests. These individual bodies are the ground of our practice and without them we couldn’t do zazen or help other beings. No one can really trade places with anyone else. We can’t negate ourselves as individuals with bodies and minds, but we also can’t cling to the self as a fixed, unchanging and independent entity. To cling to one side or the other is delusion. Uchiyama Roshi says that we live simultaneously as a personal self, an individual taken up with everyday affairs, and as a universal self that is inclusive of the entire universe. He ought to know, because he said that the question of what is the self was the overarching theme of his life! So what is this universal self as distinct from the small self or personal self? The personal self is made up of all our ideas, feelings and constructions about who we are, who other are and how things work. The universal self is the life force that continues to play out even when we’re not thinking about who we are and clinging to some idea about self. Uchiyama Roshi points out than when we’re asleep, we continue to live; our lives go on outside of our ideas about it. When we’re sitting zazen and letting go of thought, our lives go on as well. When we can let go of the small self and let it get out of the way, interesting things can happen—probably something more interesting than the fixed ideas we’re clinging to, something fresh and new that is a clear manifestion of the universal self. When he talks about art practice, my dharma brother Hosshin Shoaf shares a useful quote attributed to John Cage: You know, when you enter your studio, everyone is there—the people in your life, other artists, the old masters, everyone. And as you work, they leave, one by one. And if it is a really good working day, well, you leave, too. Maybe when we arrive on the cushion, there’s also a lot of subject and object happening—me and a lot of other people and my relationships with them, what they think of me, what I need to do for them, and how I compare to them. If instead we can sit in the middle of nonseparation, where there is no small self to manifest, then we can leave too. When we do, then the things we think we want from our practice arise naturally. We usually come to practice wanting something out of it, like peace, stability or wisdom. If we sit so we can learn to act that way, it’s still an act, and we’re still stuck on an idea of who we should be. When we put small self aside, the real peace, stability and wisdom show up. It’s no longer about how practice can benefit me; it’s now the universe doing what the universe does. We’re seeing our lives from the broadest possible perspective and manifesting that very broad perspective in our day-to-day activities. Okumura Roshi says that studying the self means studying how to walk with others. That’s a good summary of how we need to carry these two aspects of self. How do we take care of ourselves and carry out our individual responsibilities, and also not forget that the self is empty and doesn’t need to be defended? He says this is why we need sangha: so we can learn to walk together with others while we hold both of these aspects. Buddhism says that self-clinging is one of the most basic delusions. That means it’s pretty deeply rooted, which is a problem. Okumura Roshi says that almost all of our actions, wholesome or unwholesome, are based on self-centeredness. The three things we use to create karma are body, speech and mind, and that’s because they’re the three things we use to take action. That puts self-clinging at the center of our karma. It influences all of our actions, and potentially the outcomes of those actions. Seeing our self-clinging doesn’t mean we don’t take action. We need to see clearly what’s happening and still take the most skillful action we can. We can’t wait for some state of purity that’s somewhere other than right here, or we can’t do our practice or our bodhisattva work. Okumura Roshi says we have to try to become aware of our self-clinging even while we’re trying to do something wholesome in the world. How do we gain some insight into the nature of self so we can be free from self-clinging? Ironically, the idea that we need to study or acquire something in order to get rid of this delusion about self is itself a problem. We might imagine that we need to correct our mistaken thinking about the self, or get rid of our delusion about the self. All we really need to do is get out of the way. Dogen says that practice and awakening are not two. When we take the zazen posture, we aren’t controlled by delusive thoughts. His teacher Tendo Nyojo used the expression shin jin datsu raku 身心脱落, dropping off body and mind, to describe being freed from the karmic self. He first heard this expression from his teacher when he was 25, and he didn’t get it. What is this dropping off body and mind? Nyojo said that dropping off body and mind is zazen! Dogen later taught that practice without self-centeredness is itself awakening. The way to understand the self and be able to let go of it is to sit zazen. It’s not that we’re going to learn something new about the self that we’re then going to use to be free from it. It’s that zazen is itself dropping off body and mind, which is being free from the karmic self. Uchiyama Roshi describes someone sitting in zazen as simultaneously being pulled around by thoughts about desires and also letting go of thoughts. He says this is an ordinary person living out universal self. In zazen we open the hand and let thoughts come and go by themselves. This is non-thinking. Even so, the mind keeps functioning by itself in each moment. The stream of consciousness is like a waterfall; it constantly flows but has no permanent nature or self. Even though thoughts are coming and going, we don’t take action based on those thoughts, so we don’t create karma. This is what Dogen meant in Shobogenzo Zuimonki when he said zazen is the true form of the self: Sitting itself is the practice of the Buddha. Sitting itself is not-doing. It is nothing but the true form of the Self. Apart from this, there is nothing to seek as the buddha-dharma. True self here means the self before discrimination between self and other, delusion and awakening, etc. Uchiyama Roshi has a great description for this non-separation of beings: you exist within my universal self. If you exist within me, how can we be separate? How can I want to cause you suffering by breaking precepts or doing something unwholesome? I’m just hurting myself. In zazen, we begin to see that relying on small self alone is ultimately unsatisfactory because it’s impermanent and we can’t hang onto it. The idea of a fixed self is an illusion, so it doesn’t make sense for us to build our entire world around it. In the Sutta Nipatta, the Buddha said, Live in the world relying on the Self alone as a foundation, be freed from all things, depending on no thing. The self here is universal self, the self that is not separate from all beings and not our own personal property. When we rely on universal self rather than small self, we don’t get caught up in self-clinging. We see that the small self is a manifestation of universal self. Small self is real and we can’t ignore it, but it’s not the whole story and it’s not the basis for anything. When we let go of small self, what a relief! We’re freed from all things and depending on no thing. Buddha says the same thing in the Dhammapada: Take refuge in Self, take refuge in Dharma, take refuge in nothing else. Again, this is big Self or universal self. Uchiyama Roshi struggled to come up with the right term for this big Self. He tried things like “the actual reality of life” but people didn’t make the connection that this was all about them. There’s me here and the actual reality of life out over there. In the end, it makes sense to call this thing the universal self, because what’s more intimate to us than that? You exist within my universal self. When we can let go of the small self we can start to explore the universal self because, after all, it’s our own life. The whole world is our universal self. Whatever is happening in the world is my own life playing itself out—those things exist in my universal self. The joy and suffering of others is my life. Wholesome and unwholesome things in the world are my universal self. It puts our bodhisattva vows into new perspective. To say My small self or my life are a part of a larger whole still misses the mark by creating separation. My small self is the entirety of my universal self, Chinese Zen master Hongzhi was asked, “What is the self before discrimination?” He answered, “A toad in a well swallows the moon.” A tiny being in a narrow well contains the whole universe. This universal self is beyond what we think about it, so talking about it is kind of pointless. It comes down to how the universal self lives out the universal self through the small self. It’s the day-to-day things we do when we do them without self-clinging, because we’re paying attention to the hindrances that come up when we’re stuck on our ideas about self. If we look closely at our suffering when it arises, we often see that it’s happening because some aspect of our self-concept is being challenged. We have taintedly attached to self. What can we do? We can drop expectation. Our ideas about how things “should” be are only our ideas and have no bearing on what the universe is actually doing. Struggling with how things “should” be is a recipe for suffering. There is no guarantee that we will be healthy, comfortable, popular or even safe. In the midst of that, contentment still arises, and it arises because we are without attachment. As soon as we go chasing after something we don’t have and running away from things we don’t want, the most basic kind of suffering has set in. We also need to drop our fixed ideas about self and others. The human condition is that we evaluate everything we encounter for its usefulness to ourselves. When the government, the sangha, the family or any other human group doesn’t give us what we’ve decided we want or need, our habituated thinking says that we’ve been personally wronged. In fact, no contract has been broken. The universe never agreed to abide by our preconceptions. We’ve let our delusions about self calcify into something we’re using as a yardstick to measure the worth of ourselves and others. Instead, as bodhisattvas we move through the world making our best effort to ameliorate the suffering of beings without being attached to the outcome of those efforts. There is no entitlement and no reward. We simply offer what we have, and if others can take it up and make use of it, fine. If not, so be it. This is the universal self living out its life through us. 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
September 2024
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