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The faculty of effort is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we thoroughly attain many kinds of wisdom. 進根是法明門、善得智故。 We continue this time with the five faculties that lead to liberation, within the 37 constituent factors of bodhi, or awakening. These start with faith or belief and build on each other until they lead to wisdom, so in the beginning we take things on trust and by the end we see and understand for ourselves. Including effort or energy may seems strange when our main practice is sitting still for long periods of time, but faith makes our effort possible, so this is next link in the chain. Energy or effort is what sustains our practice so that we can work with hindrances and pitfalls and develop some maturity over time. Awakening is already here, but there’s a lot about our practice that ripens and deepens as we become more mature practitioners. That doesn’t happen overnight; this is a lifelong practice. It’s just common sense that if we want to engage in something, nothing is going to happen unless we make some effort. Nagarjuna says that laziness in practice is like poisoned food: it looks and smells great at first, but ultimately it kills you. It may seem easier or more fun to go at our practice kind of half-heartedly, but that’s not really going to allow us to liberate ourselves from suffering. We keep encountering the teaching that buddhas or teachers or deities can’t practice for us. We have to make our own effort, because even if all the causes and conditions are there, unless we’re diligent and put the teachings into practice, liberation from suffering doesn’t happen. In a way, effort or exertion is a part of all 37 factors of bodhi. We can talk about it separately, but there’s effort in mindfulness, concentration, developing spiritual powers, etc. What we’re applying effort toward is the four exertions: cultivating wholesomeness, maintaining it, keeping unwholesomeness from arising, and making it go away when it’s already here. As we saw with the four bases of mystical power, even if we make “progress” in our practice, we can’t stop making effort or we’ll backslide. Habituated thinking kicks back in and we forget about practice and the dharma. We lose the wholesomeness we’ve cultivated and no more arises. Unwholesomeness starts arising again and doesn’t leave. A couple of aspects of skillfulness are involved in making effort. We have to know what skillfullness to encourage and maintain, and what unskillfulness to discourage and abandon. We also have to be skillful in how we do that. We need to be skillful in encouraging skillfulness! If the means of cultivating skillfulness is itself unskillful, we’ve got a problem; for instance, treating hatred with hatred is a problem. To skillfully cultivate skillfulness, we need to really understand cause and effect. If we do something unwholesome for the sake of helping something wholesome to arise, that could be dangerous. We have to see clearly what we’re doing and what kind of effort we’re making. Thus energy alone doesn’t work so well. It needs the support of the other elements of the eightfold path and all of the other 37 elements of bodhi including wisdom, which is the second half of this gate statement. We’ll talk more about that in a moment. We can start to see the connection between faith or belief and effort. Remember that Gate 58 said that with belief, we don’t blindly follow the words of others. Dogen says: With humility, we should not slacken and regress. Such not slackening nor regressing involves making diligent effort. To be diligent means not seeking fame and profit, and not having attachments to sounds and colors. Therefore we should not look at the words and phrases of Confucius or Laozi, and should not look at the Surangama or Complete Enlightenment scriptures. . . . We should exclusively study the expressions coming from the activities of buddhas and ancestors from the time of the seven world-honored buddhas to the present. If we are not concerned with the activities of the buddha ancestors, and vainly make our efforts in the evil path of fame and profit, how could this be the study of the way? (1) Faith also keeps us from looking in the wrong place for ways to sustain our effort. If we’re looking for recognition for our exertion, we might not get it—but is that really the reason we’re practicing? Are we looking for a personal reward, some special experience or mystical power? Even Uchiyama Roshi had to struggle with that. He says: I had a very hard time when I stayed at a temple in Nagano for a year in 1947-48. Although I practiced wholeheartedly, no one recognized my efforts. Rather I was used like a servant by an old woman at the temple. I felt miserable! . . . I always felt that I was throwing stones into a bottomless ravine. I didn’t have even the slightest response from others about my activities. Empty space is like this. No matter how hard we practice, there is no response. And yet we just keep practicing. This is the point: we have to practice. (2) We also need some discernment about how much effort to make. Sometimes we see something less than ideal arising and all we really need to do to dissolve it is to watch it and pay attention, but sometimes it takes a lot of effort for some unwholesome, unskillful thing to get dismantled. We need to not exhaust ourselves, but we also need to not give up too soon or think we’ve somehow reached the end of practice. However, of course, even before that we need to understand delusion and to see our own tendency toward the three poisons and the suffering that come from them. There’s a passage in the Pali canon where Shariputra and Mogallana are talking about effort, and the upshot is that unless we see how we’re influenced by our craving and aversion to engage in unwholesome actions, we never arouse the energy and determination to practice and liberate ourselves. Even if we really are without any delusion and suffering, we still need to make effort to keep those things from arising, so there’s no escaping the need for energy and effort. There seem to be two images of practice, particularly something that looks like “meditation.” One is that Zen practice is intensive and all about effort, and if you’re not working hard enough on your cushion, someone will come up behind you and hit you with a stick. The other is that Zen is all about peace and calm and quiet and accepting whatever is happening, so you shouldn’t have to make any effort at all. (For related teachings, see information about our sixth point of practice, balancing peace and progress.) Then there’s Dogen’s famous question: if awakening is already here, why make the effort to practice? We’re not creating or acquiring something with our practice, so why go to all that work for something that exists already? The answer is that we don’t yet see what Buddha saw. We can’t always act skillfully based on a clear picture of reality. We still get hijacked by our delusions, craving and aversion, so we need to practice dropping off body and mind and returning to original self or emptiness. Dogen’s always telling us not to waste time or spend our efforts in vain, but to energetically extinguish the flames on our heads and to courageously and diligently go forward in practice. This teaching appears over and over. Of course, the irony of making effort is that there isn’t really a “self” making an effort. As soon as we have an idea about effort, then we’re not making pure effort. On the other hand, if we’re wholeheartedly engaged in something, there’s no separation between ourselves and the activity, so there isn’t an extra thing called effort; there’s just activity happening. Uchiyama Roshi says: It is dangerous to say, “I am working hard,” because later on we may say, “I am tired of it. I’ll quit.” Unconditionally, without expecting rewards, without gaining something, we just keep making an effort. This is true diligence as the practice of paramita. (3) Okumura Roshi adds: Since we are part of all dharmas, the foundation of our practice must be our awakening to the reality that we are indeed part of all dharmas, or part of Buddha. In other words, it is not I who practice, but rather Buddha carries our Buddha’s practice through me. In our zazen practice and in our daily activity of bodhisattva practice, it is not a matter of individual actions based on individual willpower and effort. It is rather the myriad dharmas, or all beings, that carry out practice through our individual bodies and minds. (4) When I was training in Japan, one day most of the other monks were away and there was just me, my friend and maybe one other person running the temple. There are a lot of jobs in a senmon sodo, or training temple, and a lot of things that need to happen every day. Some things are ceremonial and some things are about basic operations, but my friend and I remarked to each other about the many things that had to be done every day just to live there. Someone had to cook meals, wash dishes, prepare the bath, carry out liturgy three times a day, deal with visitors and deliveries, answer the phone, and open and close the shutters and doors in the morning and evening. That’s not counting the two work periods a day. A day in a senmon sodo is a fairly complex operation, somewhat less so on days where people aren’t available or there’s something else happening, but for the most part we’re moving from 4 am to 9 pm. You can leave your books and pastimes at home when you enter the senmon sodo—you’ll never have time for that stuff. When we think about it, we’re always making a tremendous effort just to live, no matter our circumstances. The body alone is doing all kinds of complex operations. Change is happening all the time, so there’s really no getting away from expending energy. The question is: where is that energy coming from and where is it going? Sometimes we expend energy in a conscious striving toward something, trying to reach a goal, learn something or build something or get from here to there. We expect to have a certain amount of control over what happens, and that’s a kind of individual effort, or a group of individuals. There’s also the expending of energy that’s simply the universe doing what the universe does. I might plant seeds and say I’m growing a crop, but I don’t really have anything to do with it. The causes and conditions are such that plants are growing day by day on their own. They’re taking in energy from the sun, rain and soil and expending energy to grow. The seed’s effort is to negate being a seed and to grow into a plant. Okumura Roshi points out: A baby just being 100 oercent a baby has the energy to negate babyhood and become a boy or girl. Similarly, when we do something wholeheartedly with full attentiveness, that focused practice provides the energy that enables us to grow. In this sense, a baby is not simply a baby; within the complete babyhood of being a baby, the baby negates babyhood itself. . . . And although the baby is doing such a complicated thing as negating babyhood, the baby does not conceive this; the baby is just wholeheartedly being a baby. Our practice of zazen is the same as this. (5) Now we get to consider the connection between effort and zazen. Yes, we’re sitting and not moving, but we all know that’s not always easy. It takes some effort to take the posture, keep the eyes open, breathe deeply and open the hand of thought. If we’re paying attention, our posture feels natural and not forced, and not engaging in thought is not the same as actively pushing thought away, but still, it takes some energy. Otherwise, we’re asleep. If you sit a sesshin with other people, there’s a certain kind of settled, focused energy in the room, and yet we’re not straining to achieve something. Certainly we’re not running away from our thoughts. We’re just coming back to this moment, over and over, so we do have to be a bit careful about where our energy is going in zazen. When we talk about making effort, particularly in zazen, we assume we’re supposed to be doing something. Yes, our zazen is active, but there’s no me-doing-something. Something is happening, energy is being expended, but I’m not driving that bus. Uchiyama Roshi notes: It is not a matter of making a great effort not to be dragged around by desires. It is just waking up and returning to the reality of life that is essential. If we apply this to zazen, it means that, even if various thoughts do occur, they will all vanish when we wake up to zazen. (6) We can find other ways to practice with this even outside of zazen. For instance, the way to work with impatience isn’t to work extra hard to be patient, or to argue with impatience and have aversion to it, but to see how it arises and let go of it. One way to consider making effort is that starving a hindrance is a way of cultivating the opposite virtue or allowing that virtue to arise. Effort is particularly important for bodhisattvas because they don’t practice for themselves. Whatever good they don’t cultivate is good they can’t turn around and offer to others. Whatever hindrances they don’t dissolve keep them from liberating others from suffering. In the Tenzo Kyokun, Dogen says: Future students must be able to see that side from this side as well as this side from that side. [Here’s the major theme of the Mahayana, seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action.] Practicing with intense effort, using all your ingenuity, you will be able to grasp genuine Zen that goes beyond the surface. To do otherwise will only result in being led about by variously tainted Zen that will leave you incapable of preparing meals skillfully for the community. (7) In other words, if we don’t make the effort to stay on the path, it’s not only ourselves who are affected; it inhibits our ability to help others. Even if we try hard and really exert ourselves to help others, we’re just not going to have the wisdom and compassion to do that skillfully. The gate statement says that with effort we thoroughly attain many kinds of wisdom. The actual kanji 善得智 say something like “the virtue of wisdom.” In translating early Buddhist texts, 智 was used for jnana, which is awareness or understanding as opposed to knowledge or intelligence. Sometimes this character was also used for prajna, the wisdom of seeing the true nature of reality. In fact, working on the four exertions or four restraints is sometimes called “wise effort.” Putting energy into cultivating and maintaining wholesomeness and preventing and diminishing unwholesomeness is a wise thing to do. We have to have the wisdom to discern what is a skillful use of effort and what isn’t, and how much effort is enough or too much or not enough. To do that, we have to have a broad view. Making effort is itself practice. It’s not a means to an end. We make effort because that’s what we’re doing right now, not because there’s something outside of here and now that’s going to appear. Approached with wisdom and a spirit of inquiry, effort can tell us a lot about ourselves. Am I making effort to shore up my sense of self or prove something to myself or others? Am I striving for some kind of evidence that I’m doing this right? All of this stuff just perpetuates habituated thinking. Am I making less effort because I think whatever is supposed to happen in my practice is impossible? Or because I really hate zazen but everyone says it’s good for me? If so, some discernment and honesty with ourselves is called for. If you spend the whole zazen period daydreaming about where else you’d rather be, or gritting your teeth and just getting through it, or, it’s time to try to gain some insight into what’s going on. Okumura Roshi always reminded us that “our practice is not a torture.” Sesshin at Sanshin is intensive, but it’s not an opportunity to prove you’re a samurai. There are lots of ways that effort can go off the rails. We need to make sure that what we’re doing is wise effort, just as Shakyamuni’s was, not too cushy, not too austere, not lazy, not being a workaholic, not sitting intensively for several days or a week and then not getting on the cushion again for a month. Buddha said in his last teaching that this kind of stopping and starting was as ineffective as rubbing two sticks together to make a fire and then stopping before the wood got warm. How can we make effortless effort, or strive without striving? We can accept what’s happening in this eternal now without struggling to avoid it or falling in love with it. We spend a lot of energy on rewriting our experience of this moment based on our expectations. We also work pretty hard at trying to control what’s happening. Some things we can control, but first we have to see what’s really going on, and frequently we don’t actually need to control it. With wisdom, we can redirect the effort we make in unskillful, unwholesome or ignorant activity toward something else. Notes: (1) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications p. 341-342. (2) Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary. (2018). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 51. (3) Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom, p. 37. (4) Okumura, S. (2010). Realizing Genjokoan: The Key to Dogen's Shobogenzo. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 54. (5) Realizing Genjokoan, p. 178. (6) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 57. (7) Roshi, K. U. (2005). How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment. United States: Shambhala, p. 12. 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
March 2025
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