The Dharma as an abode of mindfulness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] wisdom is free of blurs. 法念處是法明門、智惠無翳故。 As we wrap up our consideration of the four foundations of mindfulness, we’ve seen that each of these four gates takes up an aspect: body, feeling, mind and dharma. This last of the four gates reminds us that this world of form and human activity or human experience is only once side of reality. There is also the wisdom that is free of blurs. The dharma here is simply the reality of our moment-by-moment lives. Wisdom is prajna, seeing emptiness of all conditioned things. Of the three poisons, ignorance is said to be the most basic. In this case, it’s referring to ignorance of impermanence, interconnected and emptiness. If indeed ignorance is the most basic poison, then wisdom that sees emptiness becomes even more important. This we need to consider wisdom and also emptiness, but let’s start with emptiness first. The Aksayamati Sutra says: When bodhisattvas rest and look at experience, they don’t see any experience at all. Therefore, there are no virtues of a Buddha. Therefore, there is no Awakening. Therefore, there is no path. Therefore, there is no liberation. Therefore, there is no salvation. Knowing that all experience has no salvation, they attain the meditative absorption of great compassion known as “Undistorted.” In other words, bodhisattvas understand that all their ideas about their experience and all the emotions that arise from that are without substance. They’re things we create by ourselves. There’s no permanent self that has delusions or three poisons, and there’s no delusion or three poisons to be possessed. Okumura Roshi says that looking for the self is like peeling an onion; apart from the layers, there’s no onion there. The onion is the collection of layers that make up the onion. It’s a great example of emptiness, just like the teaching that apart from the five skandhas, there’s no self that has some independent existence. At Gate 54 we saw that Uchiyama Roshi calls the three marks of existence “undeniable realities.” He says: The third undeniable reality is that all things lack substantial, independent existence; this is shohou muga. Since nothing is substantial by itself just as it is, there is nothing to hold on to. This means your thoughts are not something to hold on to either so the only thing to do is to let go of all that comes into your head. The expression “letting go of whatever arises” is my own way of expressing the idea of ku, or emptiness. This can also be interpreted as “without body or form,” or not being tied to form. We can talk about this or that only because we grab onto or try to make some connection with something. “Letting go of whatever arises” is not trying to forge a link with some outside object. This is the truth derived from the third undeniable reality. (1) Okumura Roshi sometimes talks about three kinds of emptiness. 1) When there’s a container, there’s something at the bottom and empty space above it up to the top—space that’s only occupied by air. 2) Then there’s the space that doesn’t disappear even when it’s not occupied by things; that space doesn’t appear, disappear or change, and it’s not defiled or pure depending on what’s in the space. 3) Finally, there’s emptiness as prajna, seeing everything without self-nature the way Buddha sees. This third kind of emptiness is not like empty space at the top of the container, a sort of lack of being, and also not space that allows everything to exist. It’s emptiness as the reality of all beings that penetrates the whole universe. This is the world of the five skandhas as the Buddha lives in it. Okumura Roshi says: To follow the bodhisattva path, we study and practice prajna paramita, the wisdom that sees impermanence, no self, emptiness and interdependent origination. When we clearly see this reality; that we and other things exist together without fixed, independent entities, our practice is strengthened, We understand that to live by vow is not to accept a particular fixed doctrine but is a natural expression of our life force. (2) He says the rakusu or okesa is a great example of emptiness. It starts out as a set of various pieces of cloth that are assembled together and sewed into a robe which stays in that shape for awhile. Thus the robe is more than a uniform; it embodies basic Buddhist teachings. However, there’s a more subtle way that the robe is an example of emptiness. The robe chant says that the robe has no fixed form just like the rest of the reality of emptiness. In other words, the robe has a form, but that form itself is formless or empty, so there’s nothing to which we can attach ourselves. As soon as we do, we’ve gone off the rails. (3) It’s the same with all the other dharmas we encounter, but to chant about the formless form of the robe and then put it on the body and wear it is an interesting way to practice with this teaching. Dogen says that everything is prajna precisely because everything is empty. Here’s what Okumura Roshi says about that: Dogen cautions us not to live our lives according to our thinking; he admonishes us rather to just see and to just live. To live in this way means that we just see and experience what we encounter in our lives without saying it is empty, even through it truly is empty. That’s it. We don’t need to say “This is empty” if it really is empty. Dogen placed importance on the true reality of each being rather than on any conceptual reality we might have of it. He saw that true reality does not dwell within our thinking; it is every one of myriad things. This is why Dogen said, Form is nothing but form, emptiness is nothing but emptiness. One hundred blades of glass -- ten thousand things. One hundred blades of grass and ten thousand things mean everything. In other words, everything is prajna paramita because everything is empty. Prajna is not a personal, individual wisdom we can possess; rather, each thing is itself reality and each thing is itself prajna or wisdom. (4) The English word “wisdom” is usually about using your knowledge, experience and good judgement. It’s very much about what you personally know or know how to do. It’s precisely because you’re more competent than others that you’re seen as wise or having wisdom. Prajna is completely different: the wisdom that sees emptiness. It’s not your individual ability to see emptiness but the reality of all things as empty. Each thing we encounter is wisdom because it’s empty. Each thing isn’t worried about whether or not it has self nature or is impermanent or interconnected. It knows everything it needs to know and know how to do everything it needs to know how to do. It’s just existing in emptiness. Prajna isn’t a function of our minds or a way of thinking or believing. It’s just the true reality of things as they are in this moment. It’s not a case of trying to see emptiness in things. trying to understand and convince ourselves that everything is empty. To see a flower and tell myself the flower is empty is already extra. It’s empty whether I say so or not, its emptiness isn’t determined by whether or not I see it. I don’t create emptiness the way I might think I’ve determined whether something is beautiful or ugly or large or small. In Shobogenzo Yuibutsu Yobutsu (Only Buddha Together with Buddha), Dogen says: An ancient buddha who had never spoken once said as follows: “In death, there is the living; in life, there is the dead. There are the dead who are always dead; there are the living who are always living.” This is not what is forcibly made by a person; the Dharma is like this.” There seem to be opposites here—form and emptiness, living and dead—but these pairs are already completely not separate. It’s not necessary to say that life is death and death is life, or that life is only life and death is only death. These things are already empty or prajna or the true reality of all beings; we don’t create that truth by understanding it. In the same way, the Buddha didn’t create the dharma in the sense of that word as the way the universe really works. He awoke to it, but it was already there. It might be good to say something here about the two truths: absolute truth and conventional truth. Absolute truth is the reality of emptiness or interdependent origination that we can’t describe in words and concepts. We can only describe absolute truth in terms of conventional truth: words and ideas that only have meaning in relation to other words and ideas. We can’t use thinking mind to understand absolute truth. We have to see reality from both sides: absolute and conventional. This is the basis of Nagarjuna’s philosophy and is an important thread in the Mahayana. (Nagarjuna is the fourteenth ancestor in our lineage.) He said that the teaching of emptiness is a medicine for the illness called attachment, but when we cling to the idea of emptiness we have another sickness for which there is no medicine! Thus we have to hold both of these two truths in a balanced way, without falling down on one side or the other. Living only in the world of emptiness is called spiritual bypassing today, and might be expressed as because everything is already empty, it doesn’t matter what I do here in this world of form. We can’t carry out our bodhisattva work with that attitude. Anyway, Okumura Roshi says holding these two truths is the central theme of the Mayahana, seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action. This is important to our ability to take beneficial action. There are two sides to our bodhisattva practice: wisdom and compassion. He says we need to take a backward step to study ourselves and clearly see the emptiness of all things, and we also need to take a forward step to help living beings in need. We are expressing two sides in one action. (5) Emptiness can seem abstract and theoretical and not at all concerned with our practical moment by moment lives, but that’s because we have some idea about what emptiness is. Emptiness is nothing more than the complete interconnectedness of all things. Nothing has a separate self-nature because we can’t really say where the boundary is between one thing and another. We can’t point to anything and say that it’s completely independent of anything else. Sawaki Roshi and Uchiyama Roshi say that because nothing is substantial, when we start fighting over things it’s like having a tug of war over clouds. Everything is the result of temporary collections of causes and conditions, so everything is empty—but everything also exists. This is form is emptiness and emptiness is form. I’ve just said that emptiness can seem like abstract theory; we get it intellectually, even if we know that our ideas about emptiness aren’t the whole story. However, when it comes to actually practicing with that and releasing ourselves from craving and aversion, just understanding the theory isn’t so helpful. It seems like our experience of objects is the real concrete truth and that teachings about emptiness are abstract. Uchiyama Roshi says that it’s our ideas about the objects that actually the abstract element. I encounter an object, give it a name, decide whether I like it or not, and decide what its purpose is. Maybe I do this just by seeing an object or even just thinking about it. None of that is the actual reality of the object—it’s my abstract thinking, an idea that exists only in my head. The actual reality of the object is emptiness. The actual reality is that it’s only itself. I‘ve said various things here about seeing or understanding emptiness, and I’ve also said that we can’t grasp emptiness with the thinking mind. How do we work with mindfulness of the true nature of reality as this gate says? Okumura Roshi says: We are very uncertain about almost everything; this uncertainty is a key element of the reality of our life. Actually, this uncertainty is a very important experience of the Buddhist teaching of emptiness. (6) He points out that when Dogen talks about not understanding in various places in the Shobogenzo, it’s not a negative thing. As usual his language about that is kind of unusual. He uses a term that can be translated as “not understanding” but also as “to do not-understanding,” in other words, to actively embrace not intellectually understanding and not getting caught up in creating concepts and attaching to them. That’s what we do when our karmic consciousness kicks in. We write stories based on past experiences, including the things we talked about with relation to the first three abodes of mindfulness and that whole process of arising. Doing not-understanding is about keeping someting in mind without grasping it with a kind of personal understanding. It’s opening the hand of thought, just as in zazen. Nishiari Bokusan, one of Sawaki Roshi’s teachcers, says: The Buddha Way does not fall into form, and does not fall into emptiness. There is a point at which you jump off both form and emptiness and do not abide there. You must see through this. That is practice. , , , At the time when we see all dharmas as dharmas, we sill not fall into being and non-being. The reason is that being is free from being, and emptiness is free from emptiness. As beingis free from being, it is a real being. As emptiness is free from emptiness, it is true emptiness. Thus, all dharmas have the face and eyes of going beyond as dharmas suchness. (7) When we say form, emptiness is already there and vice versa. It’s not enough to just say form is emptiness and emptiness is form, or, we can really only say form is form and emptiness is emptiness. We don’t need to make a distinction and separate them. There’s form and emptiness as distinct and form and emptiness as not distinct. Prajna is dropping any conception about whether they’re distinct or not. At each of these gates we’ve been considering Dogen’s piece about the four foundations of mindfulness in the Eihei Koroku: Our Buddha (Shakyamuni) said to his disciples, there are four foundations of mindfulness on which people should depend. These four foundations of mindfulness refer to contemplating the body as impure, contemplating sensation as suffering, contemplating mind as impermanent and contemplating phenomena as non-substantial. I, Eihei, also have four foundations of mindfulness: contemplating the body as a skin-bag, contemplating sensation as eating bowls, contemplating mind as fences, walls, tiles and pebbles, and contemplating phenomena as old man Zhang drinking wine, old man Li getting drunk. Great assembly, are my four foundations of mindfulness the same or different from the ancient Buddha’s four foundations of mindfulness? If you say they are the same, your eyebrows will fall out (from lying). If you say they are different, you will lose your body and life. (8) Buddha says contemplating phenomena as non-substantial, while Dogen says contemplating phenomena as old man Zhang drinking wine, old man Li getting drunk. Again, my impression of this text is that Dogen is bringing the original more abstract text into the concrete world of objects and actions, and that he’s doing it to help us see form and emptiness and going beyond form and emptiness. Buddha is talking more broadly about non-substantiality. Nothing has a fixed self-nature in this universe of emptiness. Dogen says there are individual beings in the world. They are distinct and we can point to them. Zhang and Li are not the same person. He doesn’t negate the existence of form, but he’s also making the point that the dharma spreads and functions beyond our usual modes of perceiving because of emptiness. Zhang and Li are interconnected—one takes an action and another feels the effect. Being mindful of dharma and the wisdom of prajna isn’t just about processing what comes in through the sense gates and turning that into human activity driven by our karmic circumstances, although those aspects are not left out or cut off. Emptiness is beyond our usual modes of perceiving, and yet it’s not supernatural or otherworldly. Interestingly, when I was in grad school one of my professors in Asian and Buddhist literature said we shouldn’t use the word “supernatural” when talking about Buddhist themes because it implies that there is something outside of nature. There can’t be anything outside of nature, or the dharma, or the Buddha Way, or awakening, or emptiness. He used the word “fantastic” instead, as in something imaginative or fanciful. Emptiness isn’t a supernatural thing, it’s right here in the midst of form and not separate from that. Why is emptiness so important for us and how can we be aware of it in our moment-to-moment practice? The clearest manifestation is in being released from clinging. If everything is empty, there’s nothing to which we can become attached. If we’re not caught up in clinging, we manifest that in our actions. That means we give and offer freely, without worrying about what we’re going to get out of it. It means that when things come and go in our lives, we can let them come and go with much less suffering. It means we can be happy for others when something good happens for them rather than being envious or trying to get a piece of it for ourselves. It means we’re free from fixed ideas about good and bad, life and death, self and other, form and emptiness. It means that the impulse to steal doesn’t arise because there’s already nothing which is separate from us and because there isn’t really a self that can possess something. The wisdom that sees emptiness means not getting stuck anywhere, and also not leaving this world for somewhere else that might be better. Now we’re back to the bit of the Aksayamati Sutra that we looked at earlier: When bodhisattvas rest and look at experience, they don’t see any experience at all. I immediately think of Uchiyama Roshi’s intersection of peace and progress. We rest in emptiness because emptiness is already here, and the wisdom that sees emptiness is already here—and also, in the midst of that stillness, there is dynamic activity. The universe continues to do what the universe does. Awakening is carrying out awakening. Bodhisattvas are engaged in beneficial action, but they don’t see any experience at all! Because of prajna they don’t see a being carrying out activity and having an experience. They see complete functioning without separation. They see call and response arising together. They see vow and repentance arising together. They recognize that there are distinct forms and also no forms and that naming form and emptiness isn’t necessary. Mindfulness of the dharma such that wisdom is free from blurs is just like this. Notes (1) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 11. (2) Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 9. (3) See Living by Vow, p. 82. (4) Okumura, S. (2010). Realizing Genjokoan: The Key to Dogen's Shobogenzo. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 37. (5) See Okumura, S. (2018). The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioner's Guide to Dogen's "Sansuikyo". United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 92. (6) Mountains and Waters Sutra, p. 9. (7) Dogen, E., Zenji, E. D. (2011). Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries. United States: Counterpoint Press, p. 34. (8) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications. p. 287. 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
February 2025
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