​Gate 45 Knowledge of names and forms

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.

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Questions for reflection and discussion:

• ​How do you see the relationship between the body and the four elements (earth, air, fire, water)?
• How do you experience name-and-form within the twelvefold chain of causation?  How do you see it resulting from ignorance, conditions and consciousness?  How do you see it leading to senses, contact, feeling, and the remaining links?
• How do you practice caring for the body and yet not clinging it to it in unwholesome ways that perpetuate the idea of a permanent self?
• Reflect on a time when you experienced yourself as five skandhas clinging to five skandhas.  How did that set up suffering for yourself or others?