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The faculty of mindfulness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for[with it] we thoroughly perform many kinds of work. 念根是法明門、善作業故。 “Faculty” here is in the sense of an inherent physical or mental power, as in being in full possession of our faculties. From pre-Buddhist Sanskrit through the Chinese, there’s a feeling of something being created or growing from a root, so it makes sense that these would be factors of bodhi, or things that lead to awakening. Interestingly, sometimes the same word was used for the senses. The understanding was not that the senses are just there passively receiving stimuli, but that there was energy being expended to collect these stimuli and then something was created from them. These faculties might be inherent, but they’re active. These five faculties start with 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 with our own insight. We’ve looked at belief and effort; this time it’s mindfulness. We noted that it’s possible to overdo both belief and effort. According to the early teachings, it’s not possible to overdo mindfulness; our mindfulness should always be strong because it protects the mind from both too much activity and not enough, or both exertion and restraint. It’s the middle way, just like we walk the line between thinking and sleeping in our zazen. Mindfulness in early texts is about getting to a calm place in the mind or heart and then protecting that space. It sometimes feels like there are several layers in our minds: one is peaceful and balanced and steady. and on top of that is a layer of agitation and restlessness. As we saw at Gate 52, the Mahasatipatthana-sutra is a main source text for mindfulness practice in the early Buddhist tradition. It shows us how to methodically cultivate the ability to pay continuous attention to our experience of whatever is happening in this moment, usually so that we can see where our delusion is and work on letting go of it. On a day to day basis we might be so caught up in busyness, delusion and discursive thinking that we can hardly believe there’s any calm in here at all. We certainly don’t feel it very often. That’s because we’re not actually attending to what’s here and now, but instead getting pulled around by craving and aversion. The Pali canon says (and sati here is mindfulness or awareness): And what is the faculty of mindfulness? There is the case where a disciple of the noble ones is mindful, is endowed with excellent proficiency in mindfulness, remembering & recollecting what was done and said a long time ago. He remains focused on the body in & of itself — ardent, alert, & having sati — subduing greed & distress with reference to the world. He remains focused on feelings in & of themselves... the mind in & of itself... mental qualities in & of themselves — ardent, alert, & having sati — subduing greed & distress with reference to the world. This is called the faculty of mindfulness. [SN 29-30] There were said to be four things that keep us from being in that quiet place: the senses, desires, movement of the body and discursive thinking. Those things are elements of our everyday lives, and they’re necessary, but the problems start when they run wild and then the five skandhas grab onto them and decide that there’s a “me” that’s doing these things. Thus earlt practitioners were told to withdraw the senses from their various objects, to pay attention to bodily movement, to stop wanting things in ways that shore up a sense of self, and to cut off discursive thinking. Mindfulness was about maintaining this kind of isolation and protecting that space of calm and quiet by putting a boundary around it and making sure no trespassers get in by paying close attention. The Pali canon says: Just as a royal frontier fortress has a wise, experienced, intelligent gatekeeper to keep out those he doesn’t know and to let in those he does, for the protection of those within and to ward off those without; in the same way a disciple of the noble ones is mindful, highly meticulous, remembering & able to call to mind even things that were done & said long ago. With mindfulness as his gatekeeper, the disciple of the noble ones abandons what is unskillful & develops what is skillful, abandons what is blameworthy & develops what is blameless, and looks after himself with purity... There were various exercises designed to develop mindfulness, but they were all ultimately aimed at guarding this space. Let’s look at each of these four obstacles to our quiet minds The senses: Stimulation makes it possible for three poisons to arise and also distracts us from focusing on emptiness. Paying attention to what’s coming in through the sense gates and how we react to that lets us see how much grasping and clinging and story-writing is actually happening. Usually our attention kind of roams free in a rather involuntary and passive way, catching onto stuff as it goes by. This is a practice of voluntarily controlling or disciplining attention. The senses at work are not in themselves a problem; the problem is that we get seduced or enchanted by what comes in. We make sense-data a priority, and they’re all we can see. Now we can see that this kind of mindfulness isn’t just being aware of what’s coming in. It’s also actively controlling what comes in and making an effort to reduce the volume of those stimuli. For example, during sesshin some practitioners walk around with their eyes down. We also keep zendos simple and free from distraction. In early Buddhism, this is why monks left home life and withdrew from the world, didn’t handle money, didn’t touch the opposite sex and had only a robe and bowl. The average person today can’t live in seclusion, but it doesn’t mean that mindfulness practice isn’t possible or appropriate. In fact, this isn’t what we mean by paying attention to the senses in Soto Zen. In some ways, we really do need to break from the lives of habituated thinking, assumptions and delusions that we’ve been leading up to now, but as bodhisattvas we do that in the midst of the world, not separate from it. Bodily movement: If the body isn’t settled, the heart and mind will never settle and vice versa. We have to move around during the day, and that’s fine. We’re talking here about movements that are uncontrolled, hasty, uncoordinated, or done carelessly. We can pay attention to everything from breathing to how we cook lunch to how we use the toilet. Dogen wrote about this, and there’s a lot in our tradition about deportment. It isn’t that there’s only one right way to brush our teeth or open and close a door or walk around in the zendo; the guidelines are a means of getting us to pay attention to what we’re doing. Desires: It’s tough to stay calm and balanced in the face of strong craving and aversion, so we need some real self-awareness and insight in order to see what’s happening and know what to do. We’ve got to be honest and say Yes, there’s that attachment again. I don’t want to give it up because it feels good or boosts my ego, but I have faith that if I’m not pulled around by this thing my suffering will diminish. Paying attention to the state of our craving and aversion can seem like an awful lot of self-involvement, and indeed, it can go that way; we have to be careful. We have to remember that this is just five skandhas operating in the way that five skandhas operate, and it’s not personal. Discursive thinking: Discursive thinking is the background noise going on in our heads. It bounces around from daydreaming to replaying conversations to worrying about the future to wishing we had cherry pie, and it’s frequently driven by craving and aversion. It’s what we do when we’re not paying a lot of attention to our mindstate, and usually when we’re doing it our ability to really see and take in what’s happening here and now is diminished. We know our practice of letting go of that stream and returning to our current experience in zazen as opening the hand of thought. In order to do that, we have to recognize that we’re engaged in discursive thinking. Then we have the choice to let go of it and for it to let go of us. Whatever practice you were doing, the early role of mindfulness was to remember what you were supposed to be working on. If your exercise was to pay attention to sensations in the body, or the breath, or phenomena arising and passing, or whatever, mindfulness keeps track of the focus of that exercise. As we’ve seen, there’s been a shift in what mindfulness means between early practice and what Dogen taught. Our practice is not about withdrawing from the world, but about seeing how samsara and Nirvana are not separate and learning how to be completely engaged in what’s happening without losing sight of the true nature of reality. At Gate 55 I introduced a section from the Eihei Koroku in which Dogen said that Buddha’s teaching about the four foundations of mindfulness was that the body was impure, sensations were suffering, mind was impermanent, and phenomena were non-substantial. However, Dogen said that the body was a skin-bag, sensations were eating bowls, the mind was fences, tiles, pebbles and walls, and phenomena were old man Zhang drinking wine, old man Li getting drunk. The pattern for each of these is that Dogen takes the Buddha’s conclusion about each of these four foundations of mindfulness and replaces it with a concrete example of emptiness, if you will. The early teachings were designed to break our enchantment with these things. Dogen’s are too, but in a different way: don’t push them away, but see them as they really are, not as you’d like them to be. Practicing with mindfulness in the Soto Zen tradition is a bit different than in early Buddhism. We can trace that shift as Zen moves across Asia. When it gets to China, it encounters a very different culture than in India. Renouncing the world in China was a complete abrogation of societal responsibilities. Practice there was about living in the world and understanding you were part of it rather than trying to transcend it or leap off the wheel, because the world itself was a place of awakening and being in the midst of it was how you came to understand it. Rather than focusing on one element and holding that in mindfulness, you focused on the interconnectedness of all elements. In fact, if you concentrate on one thing, it can take up all your psychic space so you can’t be aware of anything else. It may seem strange that mindfulness can be about awareness of the universe as a whole instead of concentrating on one thing. How can I attend to everything at once? Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it—that we think there’s an I that has to be in charge of processing everything that comes in, rather than remembering that there is no separate I doing something? We should take a moment here to consider mind or xin 心 as a word. We’re not talking about psychological mind. The original terms include the heart as well as the mind; there’s a sense in which the psychological mind is in the realm of subject and object while the heart/mind is about non-separation. Okumura Roshi says: Uchiyama Kosho Roshi often said that the xin used in Zen is not “psychological mind,” but it is rather “life,” which includes both subject and object. In the 1970s when I tried to explain this to an American friend, he was puzzled by the expression “psychological mind” and asked, “Is there such a thing as mind that is not psychological?” In Zen, I think we would say yes. “Many kinds of work” in the gate statement above actually means wholesome or morally good actions, though there is a kanji there for work activity. It’s very much about everyday tasks related to operations, manufacturing, producing, cultivating, harvesting, or doing business. I’d say there’s a connection here with right livelihood as well as right mindfulness on the eightfold path. Intersecting these two things—mindfulness and work—we get the teaching that being aware of emptiness and interconnectedness lets us carry out our tasks in the temple or the world in a way that brings wholesomeness and liberates beings from suffering. The gate statement says “thoroughly” perform many kinds or work, and that says to me nonseparation of actor and action. Doing work in a mindful way seems like an individual activity: I’m cleaning my gutters or washing my floor by myself and keeping my attention on what this body and mind are doing. However, in the Eihei Shingi, Dogen says we have to do our work with both a private mind and a public mind. He’s talking about the work leader when he says this, but by extension he means all of us. When we’re working with or supervising others, we pay attention to their situations as well as our own. When we’re working alone, we’re still part of this interconnected reality living with all beings. In their translation of the Eihei Shingi, Okumura Roshi and Taigen Leighton say in the introduction: Mindful work is work done without a doer, a task, or an outcome. When we are not separate from action, we perform thoroughly—we do all that is necessary with nothing extra and nothing left out. No matter whether the task at hand is simple, like putting books back on a shelf, or more complex, like figuring out why the car has suddenly begun to make a high-pitched whine, we can do it seamlessly. That doesn’t mean we do it to the exclusion of awareness that the bookend is about to tip over or that a toddler on a trike has just pedaled up behind the back bumper. As Dogen teaches in the Tenzo Kyokun (Instructions for the Cook), each item with which we’re working needs to be handled carefully and with understanding about its relationship to all other dharmas. He quotes an old teacher: When steaming rice, regard the pot as your own head; when washing rice, know that the water is your own life. Later on in that book, Dogen quotes an earlier text, the Zen-en Shingi: For monks to be practicing peacefully in their quarters and value and protect the temple property is the reward of the work leader. Clearly the work leader’s job is to take care of people in the community, not just to worry about the building and grounds. There’s a public mind necessary for that role and the ability to exercise prajna in managing daily repairs and maintenance and operations, but the work leader isn’t the only one with responsibility in that relationship. Workers and community members also need to have a public mind, not just self-interest. Dogen goes on to quote the Zen-en Shingi again: For a resident monk to receive and use something without thinking of its use by later people is what is not rewarding for the work leader. I can imagine the work leader’s frustration when he goes to get a hand sickle from the shop and finds they’re all missing, or that the wheelbarrow got broken and wasn’t fixed or replaced, or somebody used up the last of the glue and rice paper for fixing the doors and didn’t say anything. It’s a poor return for the effort and care and attention the work leader is exercising in supporting the sangha. It’s like the sangha is saying your work belongs to me and my work belongs to me, so there! Dogen makes the point that the work leader’s effort and reward is the community’s effort and reward and vice versa. How could the work leader’s job be only the spreading of conventional truth? How could this be only something received and used as a means to get somewhere along the road? This is a classic example of seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action. We’ve got mindfulness of what we’re doing here and now as well as mindfulness of the universe as a whole. For the work leader, he’s taking care of everyone in the temple and the temple itself by carrying out everyday tasks. For the community, they’re picking up and using things to do the things they need to do, but they’re not forgetting about the use of those things by later people. The work leader is doing more than spreading conventional truth, in other words, just moving about in the world of form. The community is doing more than just accepting the support of the work leader taking care of the temple so they can do their own practice and get themselves somewhere farther along down the road. The mutual activity of work leader and community is itself a complete expression of thusness and awakening. It’s thoroughly doing many kinds of work. Mindful work isn’t about doing something now to get a reward later. It’s the total functioning of this moment, with nothing outside of here and now. I’m not only cleaning my gutters so that when it rains tomorrow the water doesn’t back up. I’m not only washing my floor so the floor will be clean. Simply carrying out those activities is itself practice if we don’t forget to approach them with attention. That’s when we step through this dharma gate and engage in work for the benefit of all beings. There’s a pitfall here: we can get really precious about sweeping the zendo or washing the teapot. We can get some idea about what mindful work “should” be. Then it becomes magical and special and we try to wring some peak experience out of it. It’s just sweeping the zendo and washing the teapot. Those activities aren’t any more pure or worthy than writing a piece of software or selling insurance or fixing the car. I’ve seen people reluctant to use their professional skills on behalf of their temple when asked. because “I do that all week. When I’m here I just want to do simple jobs that are real practice!” Uusually that means something like raking gravel or cleaning incense burners or sweeping the front walk with a twig broom. They have some idea about doing simple medieval Asian tasks (that’s real practice!) as opposed to what sangha really needs, which might be budgeting or legal advice or human resource management or something. Yes, what the work leader does to take care of the temple is bodhisattva activity and mindful work—building altars, cutting down trees, repairing walls and ceilings—but so is board service and helping to manage the electronic archive and taking care of our own lives, families, jobs and schoolwork. Seeing the way Buddha sees, in other words being mindful of both form and emptiness, means we can do many kinds of work as beneficial action. 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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