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Not being foolish is a gate of Dharma illumination; for it stops the killing of living things. 道理を知り愚かでないことは法明門である。それは殺生を断つからである。 Sometimes in translations, for “foolishness” we can read “ignorance.” At Gate 39 I shared a verse from the end of a sutra in which the Buddha said One should associate with the wise, not the foolish. In that case, he was talking about monks who were displaying their ignorance of his teachings by quarreling amongst themselves. That’s one frame for thinking about this gate. However, we also know that foolishness is one of the two things Uchiyama Roshi saw in modern life; the other is craziness. He described craziness and foolishness as two ends of a spectrum in the same way that thinking and sleeping are two ends of the zazen spectrum. In this essay I’m intentionally going to take the “foolishness” in this gate from Uchiyama Roshi’s point of view, and then tie all these elements together. One pattern we’re going to keep seeing is that we’ve got craziness, chasing, overactivity and overthinking, and we’ve got foolishness, ignorance, escaping, isolation and disengagement. These play out in zazen and also in the rest of day to day life. Let’s start with foolishness as ignorance and see how that’s related to working with the first precept about not killing. Then let’s look at foolishness as disengagement or inaction and see how that might relate as well. Ignorance here is ignorance of Buddha’s teachings, not knowing about the nature of suffering and how it arises, and not knowing about the three marks of existence (interconnection, impermanence and no-self). If we don’t understanding how the universe really works, if we’re out of touch with this one unified reality, then we make mistakes. To avoid making mistakes about killing beings, we have to be really clear about who and what other beings are, and also about who and what this small self is and how they’re related. Of course, one of the first problems we run into with the first precept is that it’s not possible to live without eating other beings, so it’s not possible to keep this precept even if we’re scrupulous and even if we understand everything Buddha taught. Ignorant or not, we’re going to kill beings. The question is: what’s our attitude toward that? Are we running around killing beings because we enjoy it? Has anger turned into agression and we’re acting that out? Do we feel powerful or strong because we’ve killed something? Are we feeding the ego with our killing? Are we killing indiscriminately, harvesting more food than we can eat or cutting down more trees than we need? Are we acting in a way that encourages others to do these things? What’s our approach to taking care of ourselves and the health of our own bodies? Even if we’re practicing not being attached to the body or sense data, we still have to give the body the care it needs as the ground of our practice. Being uncompassionate to the body is not part of our practice. Buddha discovered that starving himself was not the path to awakening and that moderation or the middle way was better. All of those motivations and attitudes are the result of ignorance. That means forgetting about how suffering arises from craving and aversion and how we’re feeding the three poisons, forgetting that all beings are interconnected and that we’re pouring unwholesomeness into that network that affects everyone, forgetting that everything is empty and impermanent, so killing beings doesn’t really solve anything or fix anything for the small self in the long term, However, all that is happening in the relative world of form. We also know that in the absolute view, there are no beings and no life and death and that it’s impossible to kill anything. This is the view from complete non-separation and nondiscrimination. Our practice is to hold both viewpoints at the same time. Okumura Roshi has written: There is being free of any discrimination or judgment. There is also valuing and protecting life. How can we do both at the same time, within one action? This is really a difficult kōan. We are confused, and to experience being confused is an important part of our practice. That means that we are free from fixed ideas about life, death, taking life, this precept, and our practice. However, being confused and free from fixed ideas can also lead us to negate life. This is what Uchiyama Roshi is saying too, but in a different way. Let’s turn to what he says about craziness and foolishness and then come back to see how what he says and what Okumura Roshi says are related. Uchiyama Roshi says that on one hand we have craziness and thinking, which are both active. If we’re spending our zazen time thinking, we’re grabbing at stuff, pushing away stuff and writing stories. If we’re spending the rest of our lives on craziness, we’re madly chasing around after progress, trying to get ahead and being pulled around by the demands of the small self. On the other hand we have sleeping and foolishness, which are both inactive. If we’re spending our zazen time sleeping, we’ve become inert and we don’t care what we’re doing. If we’re spending the rest of our lives on foolishness, we’re trying to preserve our sense of peace and calm by not engaging with anything, even when work to be done or someone needs help. The craziness and foolishness pairing comes up when Uchiyama Roshi is teaching about the meaning of zazen in modern daily life. He says we’re so caught up in achievement and competition that we’re always busy and working hard. He called modern civilization “crazy civilization.” On the other side, he said Buddha’s teaching is to settle down within the self, not chasing after things outside based on our desire. An important early Buddhist was to try to break the enchantment of the senses—to be less distracted by the physical sensations coming in through the body and the stories that the mind wrote about them. Of course, we prefer pleasant sensations to unpleasant ones, and that means we can be distracted by what we’re feeling with the body. We chase after feelings we like and run away from feelings we don’t like. We get agitated by our engagement with the world, and it makes sense then to decide to protect our peace of mind by deciding to ignore the world of form. In modern terms we call this spiritual bypassing: I’m only going to pay attention to the world from the absolute point of view, where everything is always OK. In the absolute world there is no discrimination and no killing and no beings who are suffering—but of course that’s only half of the story. It’s not reality or the universe in its entirety. What the early Buddhists were trying to do was to become less attached to the senses so they could settle down, see clearly what Buddha was teaching and have some experience of awakening, but we can take that kind of practice and use it simply to make ourselves feel better or avoid our suffering. This idea of settling down within the self and not being pulled by desire can create foolish civilization if misinterpreted. It results in isolation or escapism, cutting off connection with external objects and stopping thinking so that the mind can become peaceful. Uchiyama Roshi sees these two as a pair: becoming so fixated on getting something that we don’t see anything else versus the escapism of thinking everything is OK and we don’t need to make any effort or take anyone else into account. Both of these are pretty self-centered, aren’t they? Uchiyama Roshi was trying to find the middle way between peace and progress. He’s not saying that there isn’t some good in both of these things. Craziness is associated with movement, change and making things better; foolishness is associated with tranquility and peace of mind. His big questions is: Is it possible to integrate peace and progress in a wholesome way? Of course, the answer is yes, and it happens in two places or ways. One is in zazen, where we know that our practice is not about stopping thinking. What we stop is the interacting with thoughts, which means we’re not separate from those thoughts. We settle because we’re not grasping thoughts and acting on them. The second is in bodhisattva life, where we work diligently and wholeheartedly and make great effort, but we do it for all beings rather than for ourselves. We settle because we don’t feed the three poisons and create suffering. Okumura Roshi says about this, Neither being a slave to desire nor being lifeless is samadhi. [We could say that neither craziness nor foolishness is samadhi. Neither one is the answer.] The place where we can settle the whole self on the self is the here and now, and we do that by being attentive to what we’re doing. If the mind is somewhere else during activity, we’re creating separation from that activity and samadhi is lost. The Mahayana approach to concentration is not to stop thinking but to include thinking in becoming one with entire world. Understanding interconnection is the key here. This is how we live according to the first precept and keep from foolishly killing beings. Okumura Roshi goes on: The main point of this precept of not killing is that we are living as a part of the network of interdependent origination in time and space. How we can keep the network in a healthy condition and continue to live with Buddha’s wisdom? To do so, we need to embrace and have compassion for all beings, not for our personal benefit or the benefit of a particular group of people. I belong to Japanese society, and you may belong to a Western society or to a family or company, or to other groups including a Buddhist sangha. If we think we are doing things for ourselves as individuals or for certain groups separate from other parts of the network, we are killing life. Let’s pull all these things together. Buddha says the first precept is not to kill beings. Uchiyama Roshi says that trying to keep happy and calm by disengaging from others and ignoring interconnection means we don’t live as bodhisattvas and don’t carry out our vow to save all beings. Okumura Roshi says ignoring interconnection and keeping our wisdom and compassion to ourselves is killing life. Not being foolish is a gate of Dharma illumination; for it stops the killing of living things. Thus the way to avoid killing beings is not by ignoring, escaping or disengaging from them—it’s just the opposite. If we’re foolish in the sense of not bothering to get involved with the lives and sufferings of other beings, we’re not nurturing life. If we’re foolish in the sense of being ignorant of interconnection, then we’re killing beings. No matter what we think about interconnection, it’s already there. We’re connected whether we like it or are interested in it or not, so it doesn’t really matter whether we want to be involved, and chances are we’re disturbing our own peace more in the long run by ignoring the reality of interconnection than by recognizing what’s really happening. I might not want to have any relationship with my neighbors, but wishing won’t make it so. The fact is that we’re already connected, so I can spend my time and energy running away from that or I can put my time and energy into making that relationship work. Maybe you’ve heard of the experiment that was done in the 1940s in an orphanage. One group of newborn babies was cared for normally. The other had basic needs met but got no other attention—they were fed and kept clean, but caregivers were told not to touch or look at the baby more than needed: no communicating with the babies, no extended interactions, just fill the basic needs and keep the place sanitary. The experiment had to be stopped after just four months because by then half of those babies had died. Even those who survived had lifelong issues. I first heard about this experiment in high school in the 1970s, and it came back to me immediately when I read Okumura Roshi saying that ignoring interconnection is killing life. It’s pretty powerful! Now when we say interconnection, of course that includes several other important teachings. One is dependent origination, or the teaching that nothing comes from nothing; everything arises because of causes and conditions. When those causes and conditions change, what arises also changes and that’s where teachings about impermanence come in. When we put dependent origination together with impermamencw, we get emptiness. Emptiness means that conditioned things are empty of any fixed or permanent self-nature. Because nothing arises on its own, it’s not separate from everything else, and because causes and conditions are changing all the time there’s nothing we can grab and say “There! That’s the fixed self-nature of this thing!” Not being foolish is not losing sight of interconnection, interdependence and emptiness because when we do, we deny the reality of the life of beings. In other words, we kill life. Having peace of mind doesn’t require that we escape from the world or somehow make everything stop. We have peace of mind when we see how thing really are and stop living based on the three poisons. Not being foolish doesn’t mean we secede from Indra’s net somehow, which isn’t actually possible; in fact, we throw ourselves completely into Indra’s net because we’re actually already completely there with all beings. Peace of mind comes from living in harmony with all those beings rather than killing them, intentionally or not. I’m giving the last word to Kodo Sawaki, my dharma great-grandfather, because he had a lot to say about human foolishness, though the word he used was stupidity. One of his more famous phrases was grupu-boku, group stupidity. A point he makes repeatedly is that we can get caught up in going along with whatever our group is doing and stop thinking for ourselves. That group could be a company, family, peer group, political party, sangha, country, or whatever. His well-known writing about this is: When people are alone, they’re not so bad. However, when group forms, paralysis occurs; people become totally foolish and cannot distinguish good from bad. Their minds are numbed by the group…Others work on advertising to attract people and intoxicate them for some political, spiritual, or commercial purpose. I keep some distance from society, not to escape it but to avoid this kind of paralysis. To practice zazen is to become free of this group stupidity. It’s important that he says he does keep some distance from society, but not to keep himself comfortable. He does it to limit distraction so he can see this one unified reality for himself and then work for all beings. For him, one of the things that happens when we sit is that the mind stays sharp so we can drop our self-involvement. Then we can see ourselves and our world clearly and go out and do what needs to be done. Sitting is not a means of retreating into our own little comfortable, stress-free world. It’s interesting that he uses the word “intoxicate” and says that advertisers attract and intoxicate people for their own purpose. It takes us right back to bonno, or seductive desires that we talked about at Gate 36. Also, of course, there’s a whole precept about intoxicants, and in the Kyojukaimon it says, Do not bring intoxicants in; do not let them come in. This is truly the great brightness of wisdom. Whatever we’re using as intoxicants are moving us away from reality and into our own little world, instead of supporting our practice of seeing the universe clearly and seeing the true nature of all beings. In order to see clearly and understand we have to do some discernment. That means asking questions and maintaining a spirit of inquiry. You can’t do discernment in isolation, cut off from the world or from yourself and your experiences. If we’re going to understand anger, we have to enter into it. It’s the same for grief, embarassment, disappointment or any other uncomfortable condition. No one can do that discernment for us; we have to explore these things for ourselves. That means we’re willing to feel discomfort and to accept that there is suffering for ourselves and all beings. If Job One for the bodhisattva is to show up and not look away, then that’s the opposite of foolishness. We may not understand what we’re seeing and we may not know what to do about it—that’s OK. That’s what discernment is about and that’s why we’ve got teachers and sanghas to help. Sawaki Roshi says that our practice of zazen is looking at the world afresh after being in hibernation. We wake up and come out of the cave of our own delusion and look around. Oh! now I get it. There are beings out here and we’re all living the same life within the total dynamic functioning of the universe. I need to take care of them and not cut off their lives. All beings means all beings. We don’t get to pick and choose which ones we’re connected to; we’re connected to all of them. That means they all receive our compassion and they’re all included in our practice. If someone asks for the dharma, we don’t begrudge it. We don’t make any distinction between people who deserve to be free from suffering and those who don’t. Otherwise we’re being foolish in all the meanings we’ve looked at here. We also take responsibility for looking broadly and deeply and asking: what affect am I and my thoughts, speech and actions having on other beings and on the universe as a whole? What kinds of subtle delusion am I not seeing? What am I taking for granted as true that might just be an assumption and not actually true? When we uncover one of those delusions and crack it open, something really important happens. We see the world completely differently, we stop being foolish, and in that moment, we save all beings. 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
October 2024
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