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To work for living beings is a gate of Dharma illumination; for with it we do not blame others. 爲衆生是法明門、不毀呰他故. Last week we talked about not praising oneself and said that that was one half of the seventh precept. This week we take up the other half about not disparaging others. Interestingly, Uchiyama Roshi made the same points as our gate statement in his last lecture at Antaiji. You have to expect to be trampled on by difficult circumstances, maybe even for many years, but don’t lose your life force under all the pressure. Unless you have that vow, you will lose heart. Only when you live by vow does everything you meet--wherever, whenever, whatever happens--reinforce your life as buddhadharma. As long as you have that vow to live out your life wherever you are, sooner or later spring will come. And when it does, you will have the strength to grow. This is the life force. You have to thoroughly understand that this is completely different from selfish ambition. Ultimately, development and backsliding depend only on you. It really is pointless to say that you became rotten because of your circumstances, or that your education is responsible, or that the blame belongs to somebody else. The fundamental attitude of a practitioner must be to live out one’s own whole self. That’s a long quote, so let’s look at it more closely. You have to expect to be trampled on by difficult circumstances, maybe even for many years . . . He starts by saying, in essence, that life is characterized by suffering: the first of Buddha’s four noble truths. We have to accept that we will have difficult circumstances . . . but don’t lose your life force under all the pressure. Unless you have that vow, you will lose heart. In the face of that suffering, we’re going to become discouraged and lose our way unless we are living by vow. Living by vow is the opposite of living by karma. Okumura Roshi talks about this a lot and even called one of his books Living by Vow. Here’s how he describes the difference. He says that part of the definition of a bodhisattva is a person living by vow rather than by karma. Karma includes our personal habits and preferences, and also the system of values we inherit from our culture that we use to evaluate what we encounter and decide what to do. Living on that basis is living by karma. A bodhisattva lives by vow, pointing toward Buddha’s way. There are several kinds of vows. There are general vows, like the four vows we chant after the dharma talk, or the vows to follow the precepts that we take during jukai or when we become clergy. There are also individual vows that are specific to each person about our own aspirations. Vows are what drive our practice. Uchiyama Roshi and the gate statement say that without the vows, we get discouraged when we meet some obstacle in our lives. Only when you live by vow does everything you meet—wherever, whenever, whatever happens—reinforce your life as buddhadharma. As long as you have that vow to live out your life wherever you are, sooner or later spring will come. And when it does, you will have the strength to grow. This is the life force. When we’re being driven by the four vows, we always know our purpose and where we’re headed. The first vow says Beings are numberless; I vow to free them. This is working for living beings, as it says in the gate statement. Uchiyama Roshi says that as long as you have that vow, your whole life is the buddhadharma. There is nothing you encounter that’s separate from you or outside the buddha way. The vow is how we remember to take refuge in the three treasures and look to our practice for support. It’s how we remember our place in the universe, and that we’re interconnected and being supported by all beings. When we remember that, it helps with the discouragement. Next, Uchiyama Roshi says an interesting thing: You have to thoroughly understand that this is completely different from selfish ambition. Again, our aspiration is to work for living beings rather than to be dragged around by our delusions about the self. We still make effort and we still have a direction, but that direction is not determined by the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. What we do is based on wisdom, compassion and generosity. The ultimate yardstick is not necessarily our personal comfort or the fulfilling of all our cravings; our view of the world becomes much broader than ourselves. Thus, we’re living by vow and not by karma. Next Uchiyama Roshi says, Ultimately, development and backsliding depend only on you. It really is pointless to say that you became rotten because of your circumstances, or that your education is responsible, or that the blame belongs to somebody else. The fundamental attitude of a practitioner must be to live out one’s own whole self. Now we’re getting to the stuff about blame. By the way, the root of the word blame is the same as for blaspheme, so certainly something is going on here about unwholesome speech. The point is that it’s not possible to blame others for your suffering if you’re not separate from them and you’re working on their behalf. If we’re living out our own whole selves, we’re living the life of the universal self. That means we’re not focused on our small grievances. It also means that we really understand the Right View component of the Eightfold Path. Right View is deeply understanding the nature of suffering and how it arises. If we really understand where our suffering comes from, we see that it doesn’t come from other people. It comes from clinging to our own expectations and ideas about how things “should” be. Just because I think things should be a certain way, that doesn’t mean the universe agrees! When things don’t go my way, the easy response is to blame someone else. Probably, I’m doing that rather than taking responsibility for my own suffering. I want to emphasize here the difference between acceptance and approval. We need to accept that there is suffering and how it arises. That doesn’t mean that suffering is OK and we shouldn’t do anything about it, and it doesn’t mean that others shouldn’t be held accountable for unskillful behavior. We also need to be careful about using karma to blame victims for their own circumstances. It’s been misused in Asian history to rationalize injustice and societal oppression. The message is that people born into poverty or disability deserve their situation because of misdeeds in past lives. It’s a really harmful thing. Blame might seem like a powerful response to our suffering. It was all his fault, it wasn’t mine. I didn’t do anything wrong. The related message is that I don’t deserve my suffering. When we think and say these things, they might make us feel stronger, but actually, these are not positions of strength. They reinforce our habits of looking away from suffering and ignoring where it comes from. They also imply that we’re powerless to do anything about our suffering, and that we’re simply at the mercy of a cruel world. Everything would have been fine if only THEY hadn’t said this or done that. Well, yes, what they did might have been out of our control. What’s not out of our control is our response to the discomfort we feel. Now, that’s easy to say. Maybe at some time in your life you’ve heard someone say that we can choose whether or not to be happy, or that no one else can make you feel a certain way. The natural response is: I can’t help how I feel! Without some guidance about how to understand how suffering arises—and how contentment arises—we continue to get tossed around by emotions. Because we forget that the self is empty and it’s just five skandhas clinging to five skandhas, we feel threatened and get defensive—and then we look for someone else to blame. Instead, if we can commit to seeing what’s arising for us, seeing that it’s based on delusion about the nature of self, we can cut off an unskillful response at the roots. Why do we feel the need to blame someone else? What’s the fear that’s at the bottom of that? Also, there are myriad causes and conditions for everything that arises and everything that happens. The person or circumstance we’re blaming is in the midst of countless dynamics. We’re only seeing the affect on ourselves, but there’s much more going on than that and we need to keep the broadest view. I’m one small piece of the total picture of this moment. That doesn’t mean that I and my suffering are not important. They’re just not the whole story. Now, what does this mean in the context of our individual practice? In this dharma family, the approach has been that we are responsible for our own practice. As Uchiyama Roshi just said, Ultimately, development and backsliding depend only on you. We can find lots of excuses not to practice: we’re too tired, too busy, too old, whatever. We’re kind of blaming our circumstances. When I was leading the Milwaukee Zen Center, sometimes sangha members would apologize for not attending regularly and give some reason, as though they were injuring or insulting me somehow by not being around! I always said two things: 1) I’m not taking attendance or keeping score. Be here as your life permits . . . but 2) We make time for the things we think are important. When your practice becomes important to you and you’re committed to it, you will have time to practice. The responsibility is yours. Okumura Roshi has often told the story of his ordination with Uchiyama Roshi, who said he never encourages anyone to ordain because being a monk is difficult and there are a lot of meaningless people already in robes. However, if Okumura Roshi wanted to be a true practitioner of zazen, he would do the ceremony. Okumura Roshi said. “I still appreciate his reply to my request—it left me no room for making excuses or shifting blame.” No one had talked him into this, so when things got tough, that wasn’t someone else’s fault. And after that, when Okumura Roshi’s father met with Uchiyama Roshi on the day of the ordination, he said, by way of a standard Japanese expression of gratitude, “Please take care of my son.” Uchiyama Roshi said he couldn’t do that and that the young man had to practice by himself and walk on his own legs. To this day, in this dharma family, during zazen the teacher sits facing the wall like everyone else. Uchiyama Roshi said he never faces his disciples: he faces the Buddha and walks in that direction as his own practice. If others want to practice with him they should also face the Buddha and go in the same direction with their own feet. Okumura Roshi has always tried to follow his example by relying on the teachings and not on the teacher. However, what about when a few of those living beings really, really seem to be at fault for what’s wrong in our lives or in the world? It’s not easy to just turn on our loving-kindness is it? That’s because blame is related to anger. Trying not to blame others for our suffering is not the same as expecting them to take responsibility for their actions. We can work on discerning the causes of suffering without doing that in the midst of anger and ill will, though this is not easy. We can start by remembering that the real problem is ignorance. When people don’t understand how the world really works and what the self really is, they take unskillful action. That action and the resulting conflict is frequently based on the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. We all fall prey to the three poisons sometimes, and we all make mistakes. Myriad unknowable causes and conditions have resulted in a person resorting to unwholesome action and perpetuating suffering for others. There are responses wired into the primative parts of the brain having to do with craving and fear and agression. Those things may be amplified by our temperaments, our families of origin and our culture. The person we’re blaming didn’t choose any of that. These universal challenges of the human condition don’t belong to any one person. The person we’re blaming is not the sole instance of craving and aversion. It’s not his/her/their ignorance or greed, it’s the ignorance and greed of the human condition. Maybe we can cultivate a bit of compassion for someone hijacked by his delusions and acting out of fear. If so, then we can still have benevolence toward him and wish him well. In a previous week, we said that for a bodhisattva, wishing someone well means wishing him liberation from suffering and the three poisons. We can wish for anybody that he/she/they will wake up and see clearly, even if this isn’t someone we personally like. We can also remember that we don’t always know someone’s motivation. We’ve heard many times that something done with the best of intentions can go awry and cause harm. As bodhisattvas, we take responsibility for what we do; this is why we have vow and repentance. That’s how we take care of this dynamic; people outside of the sangha may not have a way of understanding about this and we need to be patient. Again, blaming someone and holding him accountable are not the same thing. Blame comes with ill will, or at least with ignorance. Holding someone accountable doesn’t cut off the relationship. Blame says I want to be separate from you. Accountability says we’re interconnected because we can’t help it and now we have to figure out how to work together. That’s working for living beings So, rather than blaming others for things, maybe we can point to ignorance as the real culprit. If we do that, there aren’t human enemies, there are only a lot of confused people in the world who need help. That’s where our bodhisattva vows come in. We can continue to work for living beings even if we don’t agree with what they do. 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
December 2024
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