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The balanced state, as a part of the state of truth, is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we recognize that all dharmas are in equilibrium. 定覺分是法明門、知一切法平等故。 What this gate calls the balanced state is right concentration, or for us, zazen or shikantaza. All dharmas being in equilibrium is the way we see things from the standpoint of emptiness or nondiscrimination, so we might restate this gate as: in zazen we know emptiness. This isn’t our first go-round with these topics in in our work with the 108 gates. At Gate 13 we said that with our insight into the true nature of reality, we give rise to magnanimous mind, the mind of nondiscrimination and inclusivity. Gate 49 was all about the equality of all elements and how when we give up discriminative thinking we can also give up rules and guidelines because we can go beyond good and bad. At Gate 61 we considered balance and concentration and keeping the mind from wandering around so we could get to nonseparation. Today we’ll look at what Dogen has to say about this gate, and then suggest some ways that this teaching about all dharmas being equal can go wrong in dharma centers. We know right concentration as one of the elements of eightfold path. It’s what Uchiyama Roshi describes as settling down in quietness. (1) When we settle down, we concentrate and refine our practice by letting go of whatever is extra. That includes the habituated thinking, stories and ideas that keep us from really understanding that we’re not separate from anything else. That’s the absolute view, or the viewpoint from emptiness, where nothing has a fixed and permanent self nature that we can grasp. This gate says that in the concentration of zazen, we see the way Buddha sees, with impartiality and equality. Dogen’s comment about this gate: “Balance as a limb of the truth” is, before the moment, preserving the eye that precedes the moment; it is blowing our own noses; and it is grasping our own rope and leading ourselves. Having said that, it is also being able to graze a castrated water buffalo. Before the moment, preserving the eye that precedes the moment Before taking an action, we preserve the viewpoint of emptiness or nondiscrimination that’s there before we make the choice, not losing track of what’s there before we decide that what we’re encountering is good, bad or neutral and then either chasing or running away. That place is where we’re sitting in zazen. Blowing our own noses, grasping our own rope and leading ourselves Without relying on fixed rules or other people’s viewpoints to tell us what to do, we can see reality clearly for ourselves and we know what the skillful action is. Here again, we encounter this teaching about seeing the equality of all dharmas allowing us to go beyond good and bad. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter what we do, or that there aren’t wholesome and unwholesome actions. It means we don’t need to judge and label what’s good or bad or wholesome or unwholesome; we can see the working of the network of interdependent origination, and the choice is about what will keep that network in the most healthy condition. But it’s also being able to graze a castrated water buffalo This is a reference to another Shobogenzo fascicle called Kajou, or Everyday Life. Now we need to go down the rabbit hole for a few minutes and then come back out. Dogen quotes Zen Master Enchi Daian, who says that he spent 30 years going about his everyday life on his mountain, doing his everyday, mundane activities but not learning Zen. Instead he just watched over a castrated or domesticated water buffalo. A water buffalo is not an exotic thing, but a working animal. Even today, more people depend on them than on any other domestic animal. They’re particularly good for tilling rice fields and give a rich milk. Enchi Daian says about this buffalo: When it strayed into the grass, I dragged it out. When it invaded another’s seed patch, I whipped it. Though disciplined for a long time already, As a pitiful creature, it suffered people’s remarks. Now it has turned into a white ox on open ground. It is always before me. All day long it is in a state of conspicuous brightness. Even if driven away, it does not leave. In other words, he had to train this water buffalo not to make mistakes. It was hard work for him and not so pleasant for the buffalo! Of course, this is an allegory for his own practice and training. He’s training and disciplining himself. Then he says the water buffalo has turned into a white ox on open ground. Now he’s referring to the famous story in the Lotus Sutra where the children are playing in the burning house. They’re too busy playing with their toys to notice that the house is on fire and try to escape. Their dad tries to get them to come out by telling them that there are three lovely toy carts outside for them. The kids get excited about the carts and come out of the house and they and their dad all sit down together on the open ground, but instead of the three little toy carts, Dad presents them with a really impressive great white ox. The allegory here is that we’re all so caught up with chasing after things and running away from things that we don’t realize we’re trapped in samsara with all of our burning desires. Buddha tries to get us out by offering three different kinds of teachings as expedient means. but actually, there’s only one Buddha Way and only one unified reality. For Enchi Daian, the 30 years of training this everyday domesticated water buffalo has resulted in his awakening. He sees the great white ox or the Buddha Way all day long, whether he’s trying to or not: even if driven away it doesn’t leave. Now let’s tie everything together in Dogen’s comment on this gate. We need to be able to see emptiness or nondiscrimination in the moment before we choose and action and take it. If we can do that, we don’t need to be told what to do, because we can see clearly, we know for ourselves what the skillful action is. Having said that, we have to practice and train ourselves in order to be able to see the way Buddha sees. Zazen is one place where maybe we can best see all dharmas being in equilibrium, or all things being empty. We also have to be guided by precepts, teachers and forms until we can let go of them and stand up on our own. When we can do that, our lives are complete manifestations of Buddha nature that the precepts describe. We manifest emptiness in the midst of form all the time. We always have to be careful how we take in and practice with teachings about nondiscrimination. There are some wonderful insights that can come with it, but also there are some big potential pitfalls. We can’t see only nondiscrimination or emptiness; we also have to see and acknowledge differences or else we can’t function effectively in the world, and we can actually perpetuate suffering rather than liberating ourselves and others from suffering. These days a number of sanghas, including ours, are considering how to be more inclusive and how to make sure that everyone feels welcome and cared for in the dharma center. We might summarize the wish of diverse practitioners as “to be safe and seen” in our dharma centers and sanghas. This isn’t just a policy thing for the board to figure out. This gate is pointing us to some important dharma teachings related to diversity and inclusion. Let’s look at some of the recurring themes in the national conversation about dharma and diversity, and we can see how form and emptiness and this gate statement keep showing up. Let me describe statistically who primarily shows up in the American dharma center. (I wrote an article about this for Tricycle magazine back in 2008.) Pew Research Center has just released its newest Religious Landscape Survey; I'll update the numbers below soon,)
There are also some things we know about Sanshin specifically. Just about all the practice leadership here is male. In the last year, two thirds of the people signing up for our Getting Started sessions have been men. Most people who come to sesshin are male and mid-30s or younger. Most of the people who used to come to genzo-e were female and older. Before the pandemic, the people who practiced here were a mix of retired folks and young adults, people without young children at home that require care. This reflects national trends, in which a growing percentage of American Buddhists are either 20 to 30-year-olds or 65+. Only about a fifth of practitioners have children under 18. Thus we could describe dominant culture within American Buddhism as White, middle-class, liberal, Democrat, no kids at home, and at Sanshin, historically particularly male (though female participation is increasing and nationally the gender distribution is pretty evenly split). With that picture in mind, let’s look at these recurring themes: 1) It might seem like a good thing to say “we see everybody equally” or to smooth over differences as a way of being inclusive, but actually it can be a way to avoid acknowledging our fear of people who arrive at the dharma center and are unlike ourselves. Yes, there is no distinction in emptiness, but we also live in the world of form. Yes, Buddha says that everyone already has Buddha nature and awakening is already here, but that doesn’t mean it looks the same for everyone. In trying to be welcoming, we can give out a message that “We don’t see you as different from us and therefore you’re welcome here.” Why should new people have to be like us in order to be included? The subtle message is still that you’re not OK being you. Under a veil of welcoming and acceptance that can make us feel good about ourselves, we can still make it unacceptable to be different from the sangha’s dominant culture. worldview or physical form. “I don’t see color” is not necessarily skillful; it can disregard people’s actual karmic circumstances. Treating people equally isn’t same as giving people what they need. 2) When we’re experiencing some discomfort with what’s arising in our practice, dharma teachers sometimes point us back to our own hearts and minds. We’re reminded not to blame others but to look at what we’re creating and adding to the situation, where we might be clinging to our ideas and where our own hindrances lie. It’s often a skillful means and an important redirection, but when working with diverse practioners we need to be careful not to leave them with the conclusion that the inequities of society and the resulting suffering are either all in their imaginations or all their own fault. Teaching everyone the same way might not be effective. Yes, suffering is a characteristic of human life; it’s the first of the four noble truths. However, but people from diverse communities often experience particular forms of suffering. Teachers and sangha need to see the context of that so diverse practitioners get good help and support with their questions about self and karma and where they fit in the network of dependent origination. There aren’t easy answers for this. Like most American dharma teachers, I’m not Black or transgender or a mother with a small child experiencing poverty. My teaching stories and cultural filters don’t necessarily reflect their experiences and worldviews. Dominant-culture sangha members might have trouble discussing and empathizing with these folks’ karmic circumstances, and for beginning practitioners in particular, these things present challenges to establishing a practice. How can we encounter and treat everyone equally in terms of access to practice and teaching and the dharma, and still recognize and affirm differences rather than trying to get rid of them or ignore them? 3) Diversity and inclusion are not matters of personal emotion. As individuals, we can be sincerely friendly and welcoming to everyone who comes to the dharma center, we can try to exercise our wisdom and compassion all the time, and still not recognize the obstacles to practice that exist for people of different karmic circumstances. Reaching out to diverse populations, inviting them in, saying we see and welcome everyone equally and simply waiting for them to start arriving isn’t enough. It might not be that these folks don’t know the dharma center exists; there are likely barriers to participation that are not obvious to the existing sangha. Folks might be dying to come and sit zazen, but they don’t have transportation or child care, or the building isn’t ADA compliant. They may be worried that there won’t be others with similar karmic circumstances, or they don’t see teachers and leaders to whom they can relate, and these might not even occur to the existing sangha, which would be happy to welcome them personally. It can be puzzling for good-hearted sangha members who say, Well, Buddhas and ancestors say that everyone does the same zazen, so why can’t everyone just fold into the practice? We can’t just assume that diverse groups don’t come to the dharma center just because they’re not interested. That doesn’t encourage a broader and deeper conversation about potential barriers that may be present for people who are not part of the dominant culture. 4) At the same time that we need to listen to the experiences and insights of diverse practitioners in the dharma center, it’s not their responsibility to resolve the barriers to inclusion. Ideally, the dominant-culture sangha is also asking itself what might be getting in the way of new people joining the practice and sharing the dharma. That’s not necessarily a comfortable dharma gate, but there’s a difference between naming barriers to diversity and blaming someone for them. Identifying obstacles doesn’t require us to get defensive. These are our karmic circumstances too; we’ve all been conditioned to see things in a certain way. It takes time to work with seeing emptiness in zazen and also seeing difference in the world of form and knowing how to navigate that skillfully. Once we’ve started to uncover the barriers, we might indeed start doing some special, targeted things. There might be committees, trainings or events about dharma and diversity, but we have to be careful not to make inclusion a “problem” to be solved by a small group of sangha members or to see this kind of practice as a sort of subspecialty. It’s just one more manifestation of Mahayana teachings about seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action. If we do start looking for someone to turn to for advice about inclusion, we can quickly see that there are few dharma teachers of color or who are part of other various diverse groups. These few people are often put in the position of speaking for their entire groups in discussions of dharma and diversity. They’re suddenly in huge demand by sanghas and conferences that want to be educated about issues of diversity and inclusion, often simply because of their affiliation with a diverse group rather than because of their abilities or credentials as dharma teachers. Likewise, practitioners from diverse groups are suddenly deluged with invitations to become board members, serve on committees or do other things, regardless of their backgrounds and talents, simply because sanghas want to increase their apparent inclusiveness. We have to be careful here about difference and sameness. In the midst of trying to work with diversity, we can just take the most obvious characteristic of a person and see only that, rather than a whole individual with differences and samenesses to other people. This teacher or board member is Black / transgender / Spanish-speaking / something else and therefore is automatically an expert on the issues facing that group of practitioners and can speak for them. What if someone came to a White or middle class or gender conforming dharma teacher and said: Please educate us on everything we need to know about how your group practices? The answer would probably be: We’re all different. I can’t speak for everyone. I can only tell you about my own experience. We’ve been talking about how we look at practice from the point of view of including diverse sangha members without forcing them to ignore or suppress their own different karmic circumstances, but there’s a recurring theme that’s kind of the opposite situation. There is a certain amount of cultural appropriation and adaptation in American dharma centers that can make Asian practitioners uncomfortable. White American practitioners can adopt various language habits, gestures, aesthetics, and other elements of personal style that they believe to be “Asian” in a conscious or unconscious attempt to be more “Buddhist.” Likewise American dharma centers are sometimes designed and decorated to look “Asian” as a means of creating a particular practice atmosphere or establishing credibility, even when the sangha is has no connection with Asian culture and the leaders never trained there. Often these “Asian” characteristics are the products of the imagination of the dominant culture. Somehow all these White, middle-class, liberal, Democrat, no-kids-at-home practitioners believe they need to be something else in order to practice. Somehow it becomes important for them not to be different from what they think a traditional Asian practitioner is, and this is the atmosphere and expectation that gets imposed on everyone, including Asian practitioners who don’t recognize any of it because someone made it up. When we work with this gate as it relates to diversity, seeing in our zazen and off the cushion that all things including beings are empty of a fixed and permanent self nature and encountering each thing and being the way Buddha does, with impartiality and nondiscrimination, we need to think about why this intersection is important as a container for bodhisattva activity. We don’t practice with diversity and inclusion in order to make ourselves or the dharma center look good. There’s a lot of temptation to be caught up in trends, virtue-signaling, and doing things because others are doing them. It’s certainly useful to watch what’s happening around us and consider what it means for our own practice, but our motivation has to come from bodhicitta and being sincere and wholehearted. We’re also not in this to offer the dharma to underserved, suffering, downtrodden, helpless populations so that we can “save” them. It might sound nice, bringing dharma to people who need it, but that approach can quickly become an exercise in ego. We’re in a higher position offering something to people in a lower position so we can feel good. From the point of view of diverse practitioners, the compelling reason is that marginalization creates suffering, and as Buddhists our first vow is to liberate beings from suffering. If we do it skillfully, explore and investigate our own clinging to greed, anger and ignorance, and seeing how that’s related to issues of marginalization, are meaningful dharma gates that are relevant beyond discussions of diversity and inclusion. Beginning with individuals ceasing to perpetuate suffering and dharma centers ceasing to perpetuate suffering, the sangha can then move outward to community engagement or beneficial action in ways that it deems appropriate. It’s helpful to frequently and broadly ask ourselves: “How might our practice, teachings and activities be inaccessable to people who are not able-bodied, White, middle-class, college educated, liberal, childless, etc? How am I doing in seeing both the truth of emptiness and the truth of karmic circumstances?” Paying attention to these questions will make us skillful bodhisattvas. Notes: (1)The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. (2011). United States: Tuttle Publishing, p.158. 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
May 2025
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