Mindfulness of Dharma is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] reflection of the Dharma is pure. 念法是法明門、觀法淨故。 Let’s consider first what dharma is, and then what it means to be mindful of or remember dharma. The root of the Sanskrit word dharma has a meaning like “something that is established” or “something that is firm,” the connotation being of something that supports or bears up. Dharma as a term predates the Buddha in India; in Hinduism, dharma is the religious and moral law governing individual conduct. There’s a broad dharma that applies to everyone and includes virtues like truthfulness, non-injury, and generosity, and there is also a specific dharma to be followed according to one’s class, status, and station in life. The word dharma has two other important meanings: the Buddha’s teaching and the reality of all beings. In Buddhism, the plural “dharmas” means all the interconnected elements of this phenomenal world, as in all the myriad dharmas. These two aspects of dharma make up the Buddha’s dharma body or dharmakaya. It means the Buddha is still here even though his physical body died 2500 years ago. As we saw last week, there are three kinds of three treasures: manifesting, maintaining and absolute. This is the dharma as one of the absolute three treasures; it has no boundary and can’t be separated from buddha and sangha or from anything else. The dharma existed before Shakyamuni—he didn’t create it but he’s not separate from it. The historical or real-world manifestation of the dharma is the teachings of Shakyamuni, what he saw and helped his followers to understand. This is the dharma as one of the manifesting three treasures. There is also the dharma as the sutras, Buddha’s teachings that were written down and that we can still find in books today. This is the dharma as one of the maintaining three treasures.
Last week we saw what Dogen had to say about the three kinds of Buddha treasure in the Kyojukaimon. This week, the dharma treasure:
After six years of various ascetic practices with various teachers, Shakyamuni sat down under the bodhi tree and experienced awakening at the age of thirty-five. Then he had a talk with himself. What do I do now? The dharma is difficult for anyone else to understand! Well, there will be some who are not completely hopeless and will be able to accept and understand it, so I shouldn’t keep this to myself, but should teach others so they can benefit as well. He goes and finds five monks with whom he’d been doing ascetic practice before, thinking they might be able to get it. They don’t welcome him back, because they know he’s given up those harsh practices and been eating some food and resting, and they think he’s taking it easy. However, they notice that he’s become calm and steady, and eventually they agree to listen to him. He teaches them about the four noble truths and the eightfold fold path, and this is the first turning of the dharma wheel, the first manifestation of dharma as Buddha’s teaching. (1) After teaching these five monks, Shakyamuni traveled and taught for the rest of his life, and showed others how to practice. Sutras and sutra books are the maintaining dharma treasure, something we can physically encounter in this world today. Buddha’s teachings were not written down until after he died; before that, they were only transmitted orally. His disciples were concerned about the gradual changes in the contents of the teaching, and they gathered in a council to collect, organize, and correct the oral record of the Buddha’s teachings. A number of disciples participated in putting the records together, checking each other and verifying what they heard as Buddha’s teaching. Today the canon includes some sutras that are particularly important for in the Soto Zen tradition, like the Vimalakirti Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, and the Prajna Paramita literature, including the Heart Sutra. We can read these things in books that we can pick up and hold, and these days we can also hear recordings or see talks about them or read them online. We can continue to encounter them ourselves today as the maintaining dharma treasure. Now that we know what dharma is, what about this mindfulness of dharma? Mindfulness in our tradition is about something that is remembered. As we saw last week, mindfulness is not about focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all else, or about engaging in contemplation of a deity. It’s about bearing something in mind—in this case, dharma—and not forgetting what dharma really is (and perhaps what dharmas really are). Mindfulness of dharma or dharmas means we have to pay attention to our relationship with the phenominal world. If our relationship is clear and not muddy or cloudy, then the reflection of the dharma is pure. If we create a gap between ourselves and all beings and then toss all kinds of misperception and delusion into that gap, the reflection is distorted. Now on the one hand, if dharma is the true reality of all beings, or the way the universe works beyond whatever we may think about it, it’s not possible for us to reflect dharma in an impure way. We do something with body, speech and mind that creates causes and conditions for something else to arise, and it arises because that’s the working of the universe. That’s beyond our limited position as a human being. On the other hand, it would be good to reflect dharma in a way that moves ourselves and all beings away from unwholesomeness and toward wholesomeness. If we’re not paying attention to our relationship with the phenomenal world and the way it works, we’re acting based on our concepts or ideas about things work. In other words, we’re taking action based on stories we’ve made up, not on actual reality. That’s a recipe for creating and perpetuating suffering, because what we’re doing is not a true reflection of the nature of reality and the way the world actually works. Some time ago, one of our sangha members introduced me to the idea of aspirational recycling. She pointed out that when we really, really want something to be recyclable, or we think it really should be recyclable, we may put it in the bin even though it’s not actually recyclable. What do we think is going to happen to that object? Will our wishing make it recyclable? No, someone else at the recycling facility will have to find it and take it out of the stream and do something else with it. It’s a great metaphor for our lives and practice. Putting a nonrecyclable object in the bin is not mindfulness of dharma. It’s action that has no relation to what’s actually going on in the phenomenal world. It’s action taken based on something we wish was true. I wish the good things in my life will never change, so I cling to them even though, because of impermanence, they will certainly disappear. I wish this or that pretty thing was mine, so I help myself even though I’m breaking a precept about not stealing. I wish I had a solid and permanent self because I’m afraid of annihilation, so I become defensive and ego driven even though Buddha taught that there is no self I can grasp. In each case, I’m completely forgetting Buddha’s teaching, forgetting the nature of reality, and not paying attention to whether my relationship with the phenomenal world is wholesome or unwholesome, creating suffering or ameliorating suffering. So what can I do to clean up my relationship? In zazen, we have the opportunity to notice our responses to the sensory phenomena that give us information about the world. Zazen is not the time to do analysis about this, just to pay attention and see what happens. When I was running the Milwaukee Zen Center, in the summer I had all the windows open on the first floor, where the zendo was. Every evening just as zazen was starting, the shrieking would start from next door—parents playing outside with their kids after they got home from work and before the sun went down and the kids had to go to bed. I’d spend the whole period wishing those kids would go inside and be quiet, and at the same time I was genuinely thinking it was great that the parents were taking time with their kids. The important activity wasn’t taking place next door in the yard; it was in my own mind, my own perception of what was happening and my own response. Rather than just sound coming and going in my awareness, I watched both positive and negative feelings arise: there was unpleasant noise, but a nice family. I wrote a whole story about how this happens every night, maybe I should close the windows, wondering whether others are being disturbed, and guessing how much longer the shrieking would go on. Paying attention to my relationship with the workings of the universe means I can try to respond skillfully rather than falling into habituated thinking, and perhaps getting angry or impatient that “my” zazen was being disturbed instead of seeing that sound was just sound. Rather than radiating suffering caused by my delusion, I can maintain equanimity because there’s no real cause for upset. The original nature of everything is tranquility, and the disturbance happens when we poke our heads in and add our own material. To reflect the dharma in a pure way is to be in alignment with reality. Suffering is about dis-integration: we’re not integrated with what’s really going on. Instead we’re living in our own world that we’ve created in our own heads. We need to see that we’ve never actually been separate and in that way reintegrate ourselves. That’s when wholeness and wholesomeness happens and the dharma reflection is pure. When it comes to mindfulness of dharma as our effort not to forget what Buddha taught, of course dharma study is important in our practice. Zazen, work and study are the three core elements of our practice here at Sanshin. Probably you’ve encountered the argument that Zen or the dharma is beyond words and letters and therefore study is useless. Is the dharma beyond words and letters? Absolutely. Do we all completely understand that and live in that place? No, we don’t. We need to use words to go beyond words. To read teachings from someone like Buddha who’s farther along this path than we are gives us the chance to get into his head and share his experience and the reality to which he woke up. We need to approach a dharma text with an open mind and flexibility. We might not agree with what we read and that’s OK, but at that point we also need to see from where our reactions are really coming. If this teaching was true, I’d have to change how I see myself, or my habits, or the world, and that would be scary and uncomfortable. We need to be free from fixed views, and dharma teachings can point out where we’re stuck. Dharma study is one of the ways we traditionally cultivate wisdom from seeing and hearing, then thinking and reflecting. We need to learn at least the basics of the dharma that Buddha taught: the four noble truths, the eightrold path, the three marks of existence, etc. as the basis for further study and discussion, and also as the basis for our lives. Dharma study might initially be an intellectual investigation of the teachings by reading or hearing a talk, but we don’t stop there because next we have to do some reflection. What does this mean for me in my own life? What does it say about my own day to day experience in 21st century North America? We gradually move from learning concepts from “out there” to expressing the dharma naturally in our own ways. We understand what it means in a non-intellectual way, and then teachings become really real for us. This is sometimes not so easy. Impermanence is scary. It’s about death, separation and loss. We get it intellectually, but when someone actually dies, it becomes real. We have to completely digest the dharma or else it’s just someone else’s ideas that we’ve heard about somewhere. Zazen is one of the ways that we study dharma; by sitting down and just inhabiting ourselves, we can have some direct experience of the complete working of reality. This isn’t dharma we memorize from a book, but dharma we find ourselves right in the middle of and just settle into. Thus we need the intellectual structure and conceptual understanding to lay the groundwork—otherwise we may have no direction in our practice. However, if we only have the book learning without actual practice, we can’t really completely enter into the teachings. When we’ve completely taken in and digested the dharma, we can function smoothly as a part of this one unified reality, without being bottlenecks or the things that gum up the works. We’re still ourselves, with all our personality, and we’re also seamless with everything around us, reflecting dharma in a pure way. Questions for reflection and discussion
Notes (1) The eight-spoke wheel has come to symbolize the dharma in our tradition because it represents the continuous spreading of the teachings to help people toward awakening. For instance, the eight-spoke wheel is the insignia for Buddhist chaplains in the US military. For further reading:
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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
July 2024
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