[58] The faculty of belief is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not [blindly] follow the words of others.
信根是法明門、不隨他語故。

We continue this time with the section of the text that’s describing the constituent factors of bodhi, or awakening.  In early teachings, these were linear steps on an extended path of deepening practice toward reaching nirvana.  Now we’re starting on the five faculties that lead to liberation.  Each of these faculties isn’t really new—we’ve talked about them before—but one thing that’s important here is how they fit together with each other and with other teachings.

The early teachings say that if a bodhisattva acquires these five faculties, he or she will be able to believe in the true nature of dharmas.  Each of these five leads to the next: belief or faith leads to energy => mindfulness => concentration => wisdom.  This should seem familiar; it’s the samadhi section of the eightfold path: right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

We’re starting here with the faculty of belief, also translated as faith or conviction.  The theme that runs through teachings about faith or belief from the Buddha right through Uchiyama Roshi is that it’s difficult for deluded human beings to see what Buddha saw, and in some ways it’s difficult to understand the true nature of zazen.  It’s difficult to put aside our own filters and preconceptions and be in touch with the dharma in a really deep way, so we need faith that what Buddha awakened to is real, that we can experience that for ourselves in our practice, and that zazen is a complete expression of that awakening.

Faith or conviction is more than just accepting a set of beliefs.  There are said to be four elements of conviction, but there are two different sets of the four elements of conviction within the tradition.  One has to do with how we cultivate faith; another has to do with what we have faith in.  Both of these are helpful.

The first set of factors includes intellectual, volitional, emotional and social elements.  The intellectual factor has to do with what we believe.  We’re going along with teachings that might not immediately appear to have a basis in fact or evidence.  Our usual thinking and experience leads us to conclude that reality is not the same as what Buddha says it is.  Our thinking minds might be unaware of the teachings or we might be aware but have some doubts, so this only works initially if we have some trust in scriptures, teachers or some other element.  Then once we have some actual experience of practice and some insight, we verify for ourselves that these teachings are true.

With the volitional factor we have the will and the courage to step forward and actually practice.  There’s an element of steadfastness and resolution, and also some self-confidence that we can do it.  We put aside our fears, waverings, skepticism, and the need to get some immediate payback, and we settle down in the practice.

The emotional factor allows us to let go of worries and anxieties and have some sense of peace and clarity.  Someone who has faith is said to lose the five terrors: loss of the necessities of life, loss of reputation, death, unhappy rebirth, and making a poor impression on an audience.  That all makes sense when we come to understand no-self and emptiness.  We have less to do to manage our egos.

The social factor is related to who we trust.  There’s a turn from reliance on public opinion or what Sawaki Roshi called group stupidity to faith in the three treasures.  Monks in early Buddhism really did leave society; we don’t, but we make a shift away from social influences that may not be wholesome.  There’s some measure of renunciation.  We choose to spend time in the sangha with others who practice and are making an effort to live in Buddha’s way.  That doesn’t mean we give up other relationships, but we try to see them clearly and make our own choices about what we go along with.

There’s an image of our place in Buddha’s family that says that Buddha is the father, Prajnaparamita is the mother, and the sangha is the brothers and sisters.  That brings us to the question: what is the thing in which we have faith?

It’s said that there are four such things:

• karma and rebirth, or cause and effect
• basic teachings about the nature of reality: dependent origination, emptiness, etc.
• the Three Treasures
• the practice itself as a means of liberating beings from suffering

Buddha says that believing in and following in any other path would be like trying to squeeze sesame oil out of gravel. or to churn butter out of water.  Belief is what provides inspiration and aspiration, and helps resolve doubt.  Taking refuge in the Three Treasures is one of the most basic things we do in this tradition.  Without making some commitment based on faith, it’s not really possible to practice.

When we start to practice, that’s sometimes called entering the stream in the Buddhist tradition.  Early texts say that it’s exactly stream-entry where we see the faculty of belief that this gate statement talks about.  There are four factors of stream entry:

• association with good people
• listening to the true Dharma
• appropriate attention
• practice in accordance with the Dharma

Once we enter the stream, our faith in the three treasures is awakened and also supported.  The Abhisanda Sutta says the person is endowed with verified confidence in the Awakened One: ‘Indeed, the Blessed One is worthy and rightly self-awakened, consummate in knowledge & conduct, well-gone, an expert with regard to the world, unexcelled as a trainer for those people fit to be tamed, the Teacher of divine & human beings, awakened, blessed.’

He is endowed with verified confidence in the Dhamma: ‘The Dhamma is well-expounded by the Blessed One, to be seen here & now, timeless, inviting verification, pertinent, to be realized by the wise for themselves.’

He is endowed with verified confidence in the Saṅgha: ‘The Saṅgha of the Blessed One’s disciples who have practiced well... who have practiced straight-forwardly... who have practiced methodically... who have practiced masterfully — in other words . . . the Saṅgha of the Blessed One’s disciples [is] worthy of gifts, worthy of hospitality, worthy of offerings, worthy of respect, the incomparable field of merit for the world.’

We can see how some of these elements are starting to come together: trust in wise people that they know what practice is about and how to do it; belief in what the Buddha, ancestors and teachers are teaching; and willingness to make the leap and actually put those teachings into practice with body and mind.  

If we believe in Buddha’s awakening, we eventually come to see how delusion and suffering arise, how cause and effect work, how central they are, and that we can take real steps to deal with our suffering.  It can be difficult to accept that we can use our karmic conditions to transcend our karmic conditions.  Sometimes we feel pretty limited and ignorant, and we fall prey to the hindrances that go with this human form, but we also know that our karmic conditions are the ground of our practice and there’s nowhere else to go.

The second half of the gate statement says we do not [blindly] follow the words of others.  Faith and the actual activity of our practice can’t be separated.  We need some level of trust to begin practicing, and we need personal experience of practice in order to strengthen our conviction and stay on the path.  At that point we can stop blindly wandering around looking for this spiritual technique and that practice and some other teaching.  One important element of faith is the belief that everything we need to liberate ourselves and others from suffering is right here in Buddha’s teaching.  We don’t need to go trying to supplement practice with other stuff.

It’s another aspect of “nothing extra.”  There are only four things we do in our zazen: take the posture, keep our  eyes open, breathe through the nose,  and open the hand of thought.  Anything else is extra, and somehow we need to have faith in that.

The other side of that is that there’s also nothing in the teachings and practice that we can ignore.  We can’t really separate the three categories in the eightfold path.  For instance, if we’re trying to sit zazen without the ethical element, we’re going to have trouble letting go of suffering.  The teachings and practice are both complete in themselves with nothing extra and nothing lacking, but accepting that takes a certain amount of faith.  Thus this is really not about just intellectually accepting ideas.  If the spiritual activity is only in our minds, it’s hard to stick with it because we’re not really living it moment by moment.  

Sometimes teachings and practice are a challenge to our ego, our self-image, and our stories about the world and ourselves.  It’s a real test of faith to practice according to the dharma and put aside our likes and dislikes and not pick and choose the parts of the practice or the teachings that match our own ideas.  Buddha’s teachings are an elegant system and all elements are interconnected.  They support and reinforce each other and support us in moving toward liberation from suffering.

Now let’s see how our more immediate ancestors talk about conviction, faith or belief.  Dogen Zenji wrote about this quite a bit.  Among other things, he wrote an entire fascicle of the Shobogenzo on having faith in the three treasures (Kie Bupposo-ho).  Clearly he saw it as an important element of practice, and even included it when he wrote his personal vow about practice:
Along with all living beings, I wish, from this lifetime through many lifetimes, to hear the true dharma.  When I hear it, I will not doubt the true Dharma; I will not lack faith.  When I encounter the true Dharma, I will discard numdane principles and accept and maintain the Buddha-dharma.  Finally, I will complete the Way, together with the great earth and all living beings. (1) 

Also he wrote in the Gakudo Yojinshu: Practitioners of the Way must first of all have faith in the Way.  Those who have faith in the buddha way must believe that one is within the Way from the beginning, that one is free from delusive desires, upside-down ways of seeing things, excesses or deficiencies, and mistakes.  

Okumura Roshi’s comment about this is: This is the basis of our practice.  Although we are already in the Way, we are deluded and miss the Way.  It is strange, but that is reality.  We are in the Way from the beginningless beginning, and yet we are deluded human beings to the endless end.  So our practice, our vow, is endless.  And if we practice in that way, then each activity , each practice moment by moment, is the perfect manifestation of the buddha way. (2)

Again we see that faith or belief is really central to our practice.  In fact, Okumura Roshi calls it the basis of our practice.  It’s difficult to accept that in spite of our delusions and misunderstandings, awakening is already here and we’re already not outside of the Buddha Way. 

Dogen says in the Bendowa: On the whole, the buddha realm is incomprehensible, unreachable through discrimination, much less can it be known with no faith and inferior insight.  Only people of great capacity and true faith are able to enter.  People without faith have difficulty accepting, even when taught.  . . . Generally, if true faith arises in your heart, you should practice and study.  If it does not, you should give it up for a while and regret not having the blessing of dharma from long ago. (3)  

People without faith have difficulty accepting, even when taught.  It’s interesting that Dogen says if we don’t have faith we should just stop—we’ll have such a hard time trying to practice if we’re skeptical about awakening, the three treasures and the nature of self.  

Uchiyama Roshi defines faith as the process of clarifying and becoming lucid about the structure and workings of the life force. (4)  That’s an interesting contrast to definitions we might be more used to in a spiritual context, like belief in a God or religious doctrine.  Uchiyama Roshi says that if we get clear about how the universe and reality really work, that’s faith or belief because we let go of our clinging to the stories we create from our ideas and that become reality for us.  We shift from our reliance on or faith in our delusion to reliance on how Buddhas and ancestors see reality, even if we can’t yet see it for ourselves.

That’s a big shift!  Why would we not believe in our notions of the world that we’ve been developing, curating and acting on for our whole lives?  Of course we assume that as good, smart people we can base our decisions and actions on what we think.  It takes some real courage to look carefully at those assumptions and verify whether they’re real or not.

Uchiyama Roshi continues:  Having faith means believing that things seen through one’s own eyes are not real, but things seen by buddha’s eye are real.  However, if you think that believing this is also nothing but a kind of thought, you overturn the idea.  This is doubting.  But the idea is overturned yet again when you let go of the doubt, because such a doubt itself is nothing ither than a thought.  It is an interesting world.  You can let go of such doubts, too.  This is determined faith.  No matter what kind of thought it is, it will fall away when we let go.  This is where the whole world of zazen opens. (5)  

Now we get to the relationship between faith and zazen.  Our thoughts about the world are just our thoughts.  Our ideas about faith or belief are also just thoughts.  Our doubts are also just thoughts.  We can let go of the whole thing when we sit down.

Elsewhere, Uchiyama Roshi explains:  It can be said that in zazen we “believe and sit,” but then we have to look at the meaning of “believe” in its Buddhist sense.  Ordinarily, we use the word “believe” to mean thinking what someone has said is true.  In religion when an agent of a god or God has said that there exists an invisible, metaphysical realm, the God has such ans such powers. or that man has a soul, people have assumed it to be true and have acted accordingly.  This has been called belief or faith.  However, in Buddhism the fundamental definition of “belief” is totally different.  It is clarity and purity.  In Buddhism, “belief” does not mean to believe something in one’s mind, such as that every person has an individual soul or that God exists outside us.

Belief, in Buddhism, is to become clear and pure in actualizing the reality of universal life. . . . In zazen we let go of thoughts, lower our level of excitement, and live the universal self just truly being self.  This is the basic meaning of belief, to the very act of doing zazen is an expression of our belief. (6) 

There are a couple of ways to look at the relationship between faith and zazen.  One is that we have faith that when we sit down and drop off body and mind, awakening is already there, and that zazen is a complete manifestation of that awakening.  Another is that we have faith that zazen brings wholesomeness to the world beyond ourselves as individuals.  We’ve heard before that zazen is not an individual activity; we do it with all beings because of interconnectedness.  Our practice is supported by all beings and it supports all beings.

It can be frustrating, when we’re looking around at all the suffering in the world, to hear from our ancestors that one of the best things we can do is sit zazen.  We just think: how does that help?  If we were praying for intercession, that at least feels like action.  It’s tough to believe that zazen itself is a form of beneficial action.

However, Uchiyama Roshi reminds us:  At the time, one person’s zazen influences other people and causes a chain reaction; their zazen is transmitted to more people and finally it will circulate to the entire society.  Under these circumstnaces, for the first time, we can say that human beings will open the first page of a history that is truly humane.  I have been practicing zazen with such a deep vow and faith, like a prayer. (7)  

It’s another example of our need for some humility in this practice.  We don’t know it all yet; Okumura Roshi has called us as practitioners “baby bodhisattvas.”  Until we can figure out how to experience the world in ways other than through relying completely on what we do with the information that comes in through the sense gates, deciding whether we like those sensations or not and then basing our lives on chasing and avoiding, we need to rely on the three treasures and not get led astray by unwholesome influences, or blindly follow the words of others, as the gate statement says.

When I teach introductory classes on Zen, there’s a point where the content shifts from things that are relatively easy to understand intellectually to things that are really new.  The four noble truths seem relatively straightforward.  Zazen posture is pretty tangible.  Buddha’s life story is no problem.  Then we get to no-self and emptiness and dependent origination, and I watch people become puzzled.  In fact, I warn them that the shift is coming so they don’t get discouraged.  If you don’t get this intellectually, it’s fine.  Just let it percolate.  It’s another way of saying: have faith.

Forms, small self and the relative aspect of reality seem easier to accept and deal with.  Emptiness, the universal self and the absolute seem more difficult to accept.  We can’t see, measure and describe them.  It might even be tough to accept that there are two sides to this one reality, and yet that’s the major theme of the Mahayana, as Okumura Roshi says, seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides with one action.  Because it is difficult to fathom and grasp both sides of reality at once using concepts and intellect, as the Lotus Sutra says, we need the power of faith.  Through our practice based on faith, we can experience the true reality even though we cannot see and measure it as an object. (8)

Now we need to talk about the potential pitfalls of faith.  Like everything else in practice, faith can be medicine or poison.  Vasubandhu back in the 5th century recognized that faith can go off the rails.  He wrote a famous commentary on the Abidharma, which is a detailed, academic presentation of what Buddha taught in the sutras.  He pointed out that faith is not necessarily pure and uncontaminated by its nature.  Faith applied in the wrong way towards an unskillful object can lead to blind guru-worship, and things go downhill from there toward breaking precepts and various kinds of unskillfulness.  Thus it’s interesting that while the gate statement says The faculty of belief is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we do not [blindly] follow the words of others, that can all go the other way if we’re not careful.  As the Russians say, doveryai, no proveryai: trust but verify.

We also need to say a word here about tolerance.  Buddhism is not a mainstream tradition here in the US we frequently encounter people whose faith is different from ours.  We may believe so much in our practice that we think everyone should sit zazen and read Living by Vow and Opening the Hand of Thought.  If people want know what we’re doing, that great; we can tell them.  If not, we leave them alone.  Because we’re not a mainstream tradition, we’re probably more likely to be the objects of someone else’s evangelism than the ones carrying that out, but it does happen the other way.

When I worked for the government and people started to learn about my Buddhist practice, I heard that a supervisor who had since left was also a practitioner.  She put a certain amount of pressure on staff to practice too.  Staff meetings sometimes opened with an account of the latest sesshin she’d attended.  It left a bad taste in people’s mouths, and on that basis, people were wary of me until they got to know me a bit.  One said he was glad he got to know me because he thought all Buddhists were like this supervisor.  Let’s be careful out there!

Another side of tolerance is that we can feel the need to downplay the differences between our tradition and other faith traditions in order to get along, and that can sometimes make it difficult to maintain our own conviction that we’ve worked so hard to cultivate.  As we’ve seen, there are various teachings in our tradition that say that once we enter the stream and start to practice, we become convinced that what Buddha is teaching is true, and we see that other approaches to dealing with our suffering are not so effective.  Certainly spiritual and non-spiritual practice that leads to compassion, wisdom, generosity, joy, morality, etc. are great. and we can decide that oh well, all roads lead to the same place.  Yet what the Buddha taught was really pretty radical.  The key here is that there’s a difference between tolerance and endorsement.  We can completely respect the faith and belief of others without watering down our own convictions about zazen, work, study and ritual, and without being dismissive of the real differences in belief between religious traditions.

In a strange way, that’s a form of INtolerance: I can tolerate your religion as long as I dilute the differences and particular elements that are unique and central to your tradition.  Tolerance as middle way isn’t about making all religions the same.  In Buddhism, tolerance is about recognizing that people are different, they have different needs and personalities and experiences, and one approach doesn’t work for everyone.

It’s the same situation we encounter in teachings about skillful means.  Buddha taught differently to different people for the same reasons.  We may be firmly convinced that the Buddha’s dharma is the one complete teaching about reality, but it doesn’t work for everyone.  There are real differences in religious beliefs and they may be profound and not reconcilable.  What they’re trying to achieve is not necessarily liberation from suffering as we understand it, but because as bodhisattvas we try to cultivate good will toward beings, not resent them or try to hinder their practice.  We might not agree with the belief structure, but we can certainly respect movement toward peace and harmony.

We may think our practice is the one true way, and that as bodhisattvas we need to convince everyone to practice like we do for their own good, but is that really skillful means?  Can we tolerate and respect the faith and conviction of others without necessarily endorsing those beliefs, or feeling the need to paper over the differences or dilute the teachings of our own practice?

Notes:

(1) Boundless Vows, Endless Practice, p 4.
​(2) The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. (2011). United States: Tuttle Publishing, p.14.
​(3) The Wholehearted Way, p. 25.
​(4) The Wholehearted Way, p. 190.
​(5) The Wholehearted Way, p. 90.
​(6)  Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 84.
​(7) Boundless Vows, Endless Practice, p 37.
​(8)  Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 255.

[57] The four bases of mystical power are a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with them] the body-and-mind is light.
四如意足是法明門、身心輕故。

There has been a significant shift in the understanding of mystical or spiritual powers from early Buddhism through Dogen and up to today.  Let’s start with early teachings about the four bases, then we’ll see what Dogen had to say (and he said a lot), and then how we can think about this today.

These four bases of mystical power can be said to be related to four kinds of dhyana.  Dhyana has various meanings depending on the context; it can mean training the mind, meditation or concentration, and it can also mean attention, thought or reflection.  Meditation in early Buddhism was about letting go of being pulled around by sense-data.  Withdrawing from the senses allowed for less distraction and more concentration and balance.  For later schools, it’s less about withdrawing from the senses and more about fully entering into those experiences, seeing them for what they are so we’re not attached to them.

The four dhyanas are stages of meditation.  In the first, one starts letting go of sense-desires and the impulse toward unwholesomeness in getting what one wants.  The second brings about mental concentration and serenity, and the third, joy and equanimity.  In the fourth, one transcends both suffering and joy.

There’s a real sense of progression along a path or following a curriculum in this early practice.  Taking up the eightfold path is a preparation for meditation.  Once you’ve gotten your life in order and settled down, you can start making progress toward nirvana in your sitting.  You start with the four foundations of mindfulness, then you add the four exertions, you progress through the four dhyanas, and if do things right, you may develop some mystical powers!

So what are these bases of mystical power?  They’re four kinds of concentration:

1) Intention / purpose / desire / zeal (chanda)
It might seem strange to find desire among the bases of support for manifesting awakening.  We’re always being told that not being in the grip of desire is important in our practice.  However, this kind of desire is aspiration or intention, wanting to carry out the four exertions.  We’ve decided we’re going to practice, so we want to put energy into it, focus on it and make room for it in our lives.  We concentrate on that direction and purpose and make a commitment.

2) Effort / energy / will (viriya)
This one is about making a real effort in the long term to move away from unskillfulness and toward skillfulness.  Even when we get scared or discouraged, we keep going.  It’s not only about our activity or energy level, but also about diligence, perseverance and courage.

This second base is related to right effort on the eightfold path.  If we’re kind of halfhearted in our practice and don’t stick with it, unwholesomeness creeps back in.  We forget what Buddha taught, we get out of the habit of sitting, and we can be influenced by what others are doing.  This is why sangha is important—we need some regular contact with others who are doing this practice for support and encouragement.  Practicing by ourselves is hard, because there’s a lot of delusion in the world and a lot of pressure to go along with it.

3) Consciousness / mind / thoughts (citta)
This is the state of mind or mindset, the same citta as bodhicitta.  It’s not the intellectual mind.  This is important as a base for practice because our mindstate can be out of alignment with our aspiration.  If these two things are going off in different directions, we have a problem and it’s difficult to practice.  For instance, we may really want to live according to Buddha’s way but still fall prey to hindrances and develop some doubts.  Msaybe we’re just too bored and lethargic to get on the cushion every day.

It’s important to recognize when we’re running into one of the hindrances so we can do something about it.  Citta can really lead us astray, or, if it’s in alignment with aspiration, it can a real support and source of strength.  Watching our mindstates is an exercise in understanding impermanence.  During sesshin, we can see that the state of mind at 4 am isn’t the same as at lunchtime or 7 pm.  The light changes as the day goes along, and so does our attitude, outlook and state of mind.

4) Investigation / discrimination / wisdom (vīmaṃsā)
We have to be able to distinguish between wholesome and unwholesome, or skillful and unskillful.  Energy and exertion are fine, but are they in support of something real and good?  We can feel happy and satisfied in our practice, but is it because we’re letting go of suffering or because we’re feeding our egos and feeling like wizards?

We’ve got to apply some discernment about what we’re doing, our motivation, and the effects of our actions.  It’s helpful to have teachers and sangha brothers and sisters to point out where we might be taking a wrong turn, but ultimiately we have to do the work.  We have to be the ones who see our suffering and delusion clearly.

These are the four bases, and we can see the way they’re interconnected in supporting practice.  We have some direction or intention, we make some effort in that direction, we pay attention to the mindstate within which we’re carrying out practice activities (which is both cause and result of our actions), and we determine what’s wholesome and skillful and what’s not.  If we do all these things, the gate statement says the mind and body will be light.  Other translations of that word would be easy, simple, or gentle.  We’re not obstructed or constricted, full of hindrances and extra layers of clinging and aversion, and less likely to act out in harmful ways.

So what are these mystical spiritual powers that we’re supposed to get from these bases?  The Pubba Sutta says:
When the four bases of spiritual power have been developed and cultivated in this way, a bhikkhu wields the various kinds of spiritual power: having been one, he becomes many; having been many, he becomes one; he appears and vanishes; he goes unhindered through a wall, through a rampart, through a mountain as though through space; he dives in and out of the earth as though it were water; he walks on water without sinking as though it were earth; seated cross-legged, he travels in space like a bird; with his hands he touches and strokes the moon and sun so powerful and mighty; he exercises mastery with the body as far as the brahmā world.”

That’s the early Buddhist point of view.  Dogen’s list is a bit different, as we’ll see in a minute.  He had a lot to say about spiritual powers in several places in his writings, but in all of his writings his point is this: having spiritual powers is all well and good, but it’s nothing other than awakening, and the way we manifest awakening moment by moment.  Certainly, spiritual powers aren’t going to move us toward understanding the dharma.

He may have been responding to practices around him like shugendo 修驗道, a combination of Shingon Buddhism and Japanese folk practices.  Shu 修 is practice, gen 驗is supernatural powers gained by practicing in the mountains, and do 道 is way.  Adherents chant mantras and do ascetic practices like not eating much or walking many miles to purify body and mind and gain magical powers.  Dogen says activities like these don’t help with liberation from suffering, which is the central project of Buddhism.

Of course, the first place we meet Dogen talking about special powers is in the Fukanzazengi.  He lists various examples of awakening stories from the Denkoroku and then says these cannot be understood by discriminitive thinking, much less can they be known through the practice of supernatural powers.  Special powers aren’t necessary or even helpful in seeing what Buddha and our ancestors saw.  He says we need to sit zazen for ourselves, and this is probably the first place we encounter him talking about this when we begin practicing Soto Zen.  

Dogen also wrote about it in four or five places in the Eihei Koroku.  In one of them:
. . . suppose, moreover, that you have supernatural powers to transform yourself and move the great thousandfold worlds, and you can dry up vast oceans, can fly in the sky like a cloud, can walk on water as if on ground, and your body generates fire and water, wind and clouds, and radiant light.  Still, in terms of the great matter [of the causal condition for the appearance of buddhas], you have not seen the ultimate Buddha Dharma, even in a dream.  Such supernatural powers and so forth as mentioned above are simply the affair in the realms of the two vehicles of listeners and pratyekabuddhas and of those outside the way, and this is just the livelihood in the demons’ cave.  How can such people understand this wondrous Dharma of the unsurpassed awakening of the tathagatas? (1)  

This teaching is making reference to the Lotus Sutra, which says the single great matter of the causal condition for the appearance of buddhas is opening up, demonstrating, realizing and helping others to enter the insight of buddhas—in other words, putting ourselves right in the middle of awakening by practicing.  We’re not going to conjure up buddhas by developing some special powers that are somehow outside of the workings of thus one unified reality.  We’re also not going to achieve the “cessation of outflows” or the body-and-mind that are light, easy and unobstructed, as the gate statement says,

Here’s another teaching from the Eihei Koroku:
A capable master must be endowed with the six spiritual powers.  The first is the power to go anywhere; second is the power to hear everywhere; third is the poiwer to know others’ minds; fourth is the power to know previous lives; fifth is the power to see everywhere; sixth is the power to extinguish outflows (attachments).
Everyone, do you want to see the power to go anywhere?  
The teacher Dogen raised his fist.
Do you want to see the poiwer to know others’ minds?  
Dogen let one of his legs hang down from his seat.
Do you want to see the power of hearing everywhere?  
Dogen snapped his fingers once.
Do you want to see the power of knowing previous lives?  
Dogen raised his whisk.
Do you want to see the power of seeing everywhere?  
Dogen drew a circle in the air with his whisk.
Do you want to see the power of extinguishing outflows?  
Dogen drew a single horizontal line (the character for one) with his whisk and said:  Although this is so, ultimately, six times six is 36. (2) 

"Six times six is 36" is simple math; spiritual powers are likewise simple everyday things.  Also, there are many powers beyond 36; a buddha has innumerable spiritual powers by virtue of awakening.

And a third example:
Buddhas do not appear in the world by depending on the sixteen especially excellent meditation methods, which generate the spiritual powers.  Even when ordinary people with sharp capacity practice these kinds of meditation, the cessation of outflows does not occur.  When tathagatas expound the teaching, the cessation of outflows does occur.  (3)

"Sixteen methods" refers to 16 techniques of awareness in early Buddhism from the Anapanasati Sutta.  Dogen says the practice of buddhas is not directed toward gaining some exalted state, unlike special meditation techniques.

Dogen frequently says that understanding the dharma and completely manifesting Buddha nature in moment-to-moment activity is the same as having supernatural powers, so they’re nothing special.  Although we might want to cultivate magical abilities, we usually do that in order to have power or impress people, or worse, to take advantage of others.  Thus seeking after these things with an unwholesome motivation is a problem.  Your natural functioning in everyday life after having dropped off body and mind and let go of the three poisons—or just doing whatever needs to be done—is a greater thing, according to Dogen.

Previously we’ve talked about Dogen calling the six sense organs six instances of prajna.  Rather than just being six sources of distraction that feeds delusion, they’re six kinds of wisdom.  He also says that they themselves are six marvelous spiritual abilities.  

Dogen wrote a whole fascicle on spiritual powers called Jinzu, which we'll summarize in the remainder of this essay.  In it he says that the unsurpassed spiritual ability is our three thousand acts of a morning and our eight hundred acts of an evening, which we take as the normal state of things.  Supernatural powers are supposed to arise when we become Buddhas, but that means we’ll never recognize that we have them.  Buddhas aren’t aware that they’re buddhas because they’re not separate from awakening.  The powers are there before we’re buddhas and after we’re buddhas.  

In this fascicle Dogen tells a story about a teacher who wakes up in the morning, rolls over and calls out to his disciples.  One brings him a basin of water to wash his face; another one brings him a cup of tea.  The teacher says that all the everyday things they all just did were practicing their marvelous spiritual abilities.

Dogen makes a distinction between the teachings and practices of early Buddhsm related to mystical powers, and says that his view is different, and that it’s the true wisdom passed down by buddhas and ancestors.  He tells us, when it comes to these powers, not to practice like early Buddhists, or like non-Buddhists, or like academics.  He tells this story again in the Eihei Koroku and says, The wondrous transformation of spiritual powers are simply bringing a basin of water and making tea.  (4)  

Dogen says that even if we gain mystical powers, they’re limited and they don’t compare to the scope of awakening.  That’s not the way to really understand the true nature of self.  He doesn’t negate the potential for developing special powers of some kind, but he says that’s not a goal of our practice or even particularly helpful.  Such things as the lesser spiritual abilities do also exist, enveloped within the capacity of this greater spiritual ability. The greater marvelous spiritual ability is in contact with the lesser spiritual abilities, but the lesser spiritual abilities are not aware of the greater marvelous spiritual ability.

If somehow we end up with these mystical powers, he says we shouldn’t stop there and think we’re done, or that we‘ve achieved something.  He describes how limited these powers are and concludes that therefore they can’t be an end goal and shouldn’t be mistaken for “awakening:
They are all tainted by their practice being considered as separate from enlightenment and because they are confined to some time or some place. They reside in life but do not manifest after one’s death; they belong to oneself but do not belong to someone else. Though they may manifest in this land of ours, they may not manifest in all other countries; though some may manifest them without trying, others cannot manifest them when they would.

If we consider mystical powers as separate from awakening, or a stepping stone to awakening, we’ve made a mistake.  Then he points out that a person using these powers is limited to a time and place, and that such powers belong to one person but not to another.  Thus if we’re practicing in order to gain this kind of advantage for ourselves, our motivation is questionable, and also we don’t understand awakening, which is not limited to a time or place or one person.

Now we come to a very famous image: The marvelous spiritual ability manifests its enlightened functioning in our carrying water and our hauling firewood.  Dogen is quoting this verse by Lay Disciple Hō’on.  You’ve likely heard this teaching that it’s the very ordinariness of our moment by moment practice that’s important.  Just chop wood and carry water.  Dogen says You need to thoroughly explore this principle through your training.  It’s not something to study with the intellect but to experience in carrying out our everyday tasks and activities.  He says sometimes we do things for ourselves, and sometimes for others.  Sometimes we’re not even aware that our daily tasks are manifestations of spiritual power or awakening, but that doesn’t make them any the less marvelous.

He suggests we don’t need to compare our mundane activities with exotic mystical powers:
Spiritual powers arise along with that which is beyond anything our consciousness can recognize, and they abide in that which is beyond anything our consciousness can recognize, and they take their true refuge in that which is beyond anything our consciousness can recognize. The ever-changing characteristics of the marvelous spiritual ability of Buddhas have no connection with something short or something long, so, in all seriousness, how can one possibly undertake to evaluate them simply by making comparisons? 

Then Dogen considers what it means to “possess” supernatural powers.  Of course, we can grasp them and be hindered by them just like anything else for which we have craving and clinging.  Is it really possible to own or possess such powers?  Or is that just an obstruction?  Does it put artifical limits on something that’s not actually limited?

He quotes Hyakujo Ekai:
When the six sense gates leave no trace, we call this ‘the six marvelous spiritual abilities’. Simply, at this very moment when we are smoothly going on, unhindered by all the various material and immaterial things that arise, and having brought to an end our dependency on our discriminatory thinking, then this too is called the ‘the six marvelous spiritual abilities’. Not claiming these marvelous spiritual abilities as one’s own is what we call not ‘possessing’ spiritual abilities.

Dogen goes on to describe some characteristics of bodhisattvas who may have these powers.  They’re no longer dependent only on discriminative thinking, and they may not use the powers they have.  In other words, they’re not stuck in the karmic conditions around their powers.  They see them from the perspective of the universal self rather than the small karmic self.  He tells us not to mistake *meaningless feasting on externals for the daily behavior of returning to one’s True Home,* not to get caught up in the limited view of feeding the ego and instead to respond to this moment using whatever we have, but not being hindered or obstructed by whatever we have.

We don’t hear so much about mystical or transcendental powers from our contemporary teachers.  In general, it might be difficult for modern Western practitioners to think that teachings about supernatural powers are credible or relevant.  

Sawaki Roshi said: There are bodhisattvas “without magical abilities.”  These are bodhisattvas who have even entirely forgotten words like “practice” or “satori”, bodhisattvas without wonderful powers, bodhisattvas who are immeasurable, bodhisattvas who are not interested in their name and fame.  That’s right in line with what Dogen was saying.  Elsewhere, Sawaki Roshi says: What’s called “having magical powers” doesn’t mean anything more than having a facial expression that isn’t muddled.

It’s good to remember that the focus of this gate is on the bases of mystical power, not on the mystical powers themselves.  It’s tempting to jump straight to “Cool!  If I do enough sitting practice I can levitate and see through walls and walk on water!”  Maybe so, but it’s not enough.  The point of these four bases is that they support our sitting practice and help us to be easy and light in body and mind—in other words, to move freely through the world as bodhisattvas liberating beings from suffering without getting caught by the three poisons.  Whatever else happens is fine, but whether or not we can read people’s minds or hear things that happen on the other side of the world is not a measure of the success of our zazen.

Uchiyama Roshi says: The attitude of the practitioner practicing zazen as a Mahayana Buddhist teaching never means to attempt to artifically create some new self by means of practice.  Nor should it be aiming at decreasing delusion and finally eliminating it altogether.  We practice zazen, neither aiming at having a special mystical experience nor trying to gain greater enlightenment.  Zazen as true Mahayana teaching is always the whole self just truly being the whole self, life truly being life.  (5)

Our practice not so linear as the early Buddhist style, but the important message is still that we need to cultivate and practice if we’re going to let go of three poisons.  Just wishing it to be so or trying to become wizards in order to see what others don’t see isn’t enough.  We can’t develop powers in order to aid us in our practice, and we can’t make developing powers as a result of our practice the goal.  Okumura Roshi says: Our practice doesn’t have a mystical, mysterious or magical power to clear away all delusions.  But like the raindrops, we sit moment by moment, day after day, year after year, and this sitting generates the power to erode a rock. . . . Our effort is like raindrops; it doesn’t create change in one day, or a few days, or a few years.  But if we just keep doing it, when conditions are ripe, it happens. (6) 

Notes:

(1)  Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications. p. 512
​(2) Eihei Koroku, p. 211
​(3) Eihei Koroku, p. 347
​(4) Eihei Koroku, p. 90
​(5) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 
83
(6) Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 48-49.

The four right exertions are a gate of Dharma illumination; for they eliminate all evils and realize many kinds of good. 
四正懃是法明門、斷一切惡成善故。

This a very old teaching in our tradition.  It goes way back into the Pali canon and carries through to Dogen and to our teachers today.  Sometimes these activities are called exertions and sometimes restraints.

The Maggavibhanga Sutta says about the four right exertions:
There is the case where a monk generates desire, endeavors, activates persistence, upholds and exerts his intent for:
- the sake of the non-arising of evil, unskillful qualities that have not yet arisen.
- the sake of the abandonment of evil, unskillful qualities that have arisen.
- the sake of the arising of skillful qualities that have not yet arisen.
- the maintenance, non-confusion, increase, plenitude, development, and culmination of skillful qualities that have arisen.

Or, in perhaps plainer language:
1) to prevent bad that has not yet occurred, 
2) to cause bad that has already occurred to be extinguished, 
3) to bring about good that has not yet occurred, and 
4) to promote the good that’s already here

We can see why these are both exertions and restraits.  We’re actively promoting wholesomeness and restraining unwholesomeness, and we get involved both before things arise and after they’ve appeared.  We prevent bad from happening and try to get rid of it when it arises.  We encourage good to happen and try to keep it around when it does.

What is good and bad (wholesome and unwholesome) in the Buddhist tradition?  Causing suffering to self or others is unwholesome.  Reducing suffering and bringing joy to self and others is wholesome.  The challenge is that the complete working of this kind of cause and effect isn’t clear.  We can’t tell from looking just at this one action whether ultimlately good will come about or not.  We have to look also at all other related actions and consequences.  Thus we just vow to do our best in this moment, and if it all goes wrong, we make repentence and vow to do better next time.  If it goes well, we don’t attach to that outcome as a validation of our wisdom and compassion; we just offer that up to the universe and move on.

Buddha says doing the four exertions is both possible and is conducive to benefit and pleasure.  Working with the four exertions is associated with Right Effort on the Eightfold Path.  The important thing about Right Effort is to pay attention to what kind of energy that effort is generating and whether it’s wholesome or not.  To understand this, we have to take a bit of a detour to look at early teachings about the Eightfold Path.

The Eighfold Path has three divisions; wisdom, ethics, and concentration.  Right Effort falls into the section about concentration, along with Right Mindfulness and Right Samadhi (or meditation or concentration).  Right Effort provides the energy and Right Mindfulness provides the stable awareness for Right Concentration.  Effort and mindfulness support concentration. 

However, that energy can go in any direction.  It has to work together with Right View and Right Intention so that it’s directed toward wholesomeness and awakening.  Energy can lead either to desire, aggression, violence, and ambition on the one hand, or generosity, self-discipline, kindness, concentration, and understanding on the other.  If we’re not careful about where we put that energy, we can get caught up in unwholesome mental states and take actions that create harmful karma and perpetuate suffering rather than actions that move ourselves and others toward awakening.

Effort arises again and again as a theme in Buddha’s teachings because each of us has to do our own practice.  Buddha and our teachers can point out the path, but it’s up to us to actually put those teachings into practice.  We have to start with investigating how our our own three poisons, delusions and hindrances arise, and make effort to see through them and release ourselves from making mistakes and creating suffering because of our ignorance.  

Preventing the arising of unwholesome states

The point of this in the early teachings is to get rid of things that cause distraction in our sitting practice.  Specifically, we’re talking here about the five hindrances: sensual desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and worry, and doubt.  The first two hindrances, sensual desire and ill will, are said to be the strongest of the set because they represent greed and aversion.  The other three hindrances are less toxic but still problematic because they’re offshoots of delusion, usually mixed up with other defilements.

Sensual desire is interpreted in two ways.  Sometimes it’s craving for things coming in through the senses that get labeled as pleasant, and sometimes it’s just general craving for whatever—not only good sensations but power, money, nice belongings, social status.  Overall, it’s concerned with craving, attachment, and wanting stuff.  The second hindrance, ill will, is about the other side of craving: aversion.  Craving and aversion are the same because they both mean we want things to be different than they are.  I want what I don’t have or I don’t want what’s here.

Ill-will includes hatred, anger, resentment, and every kind of pushing away.  It could be directed towards other people, ourselves, objects, or situations.  

The third hindrance, dullness and drowsiness, feels like the opposite of energy and exertion: inertia, heaviness of mind, and the desire just to sleep.  The fourth hindrance, restlessness and worry, is the other side of dullness.  This is the unquiet mind, full of agitation, excitement, and jumping quickly from thought to thought.  Maybe  we’re worried and remorseful about past mistakes and anxious about their possible painful consequences.

The fifth hindrance, doubt, is about indecisiveness.  Rather than committing to practice and investigating the self and the rest of reality, we can’t commit because we’ve got lingering doubts about this whole thing.

These five hindrances aren’t coming from somewhere else.  Because of our karmic conditions, we have these tendencies, and when a cause appears, hindrances arise.  These are things we’re generating ourselves.  The problem isn’t objects of our senses; that’s not where delusion lies.  The problem is what we do with that sensory information.  We create an immediate overall impression of that object as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, and cling to that conclusion—and then start exploring details of the object or our perception of the object.  Because of greed, we can become fascinated with something we think is agreeable.  Because of aversion, we can be repulsed by something we find disagreeable.  All that just perpetuates and multiplies the delusion.  Instead, can we just be aware of the object and the process that’s happening without being hijacked and writing a story?

Abandoning unwholesome states once arisen

Despite our best intentions, we may still notice that something unwholesome has arrived and we need to make it disappear.  Buddha had remedies for each of the five hindrances and for the hindrances as a whole.  One is to replace the unwholesome thought with the opposite  wholesome one.  If we’re struggling with grasping and desire, we consider impermanence and the instablity of whatever we’re clinging to.  For ill will, we consider loving kindness and the wish that all beings be well and happy.  For dullness and drowsiness, some kinhin or even brisk walking might help, or simply renewing our vows or aspiration.  For restlessness and worry, we can calm down by mindfulness of breathing.  For doubt, investigate the teachings and practice, ask questions, and engage in study.

In general, it’s said that there are three ways to work with these hindrances that are clamoring for our attention: consider that what’s arising is unwholecome and will have unfortunate consequences; redirect your attention to the opposite wholesome condition; and accept and acknowledge it, look at it head-on and investigate where it’s coming from and how it’s arising.

These five hindrances make up the unwholesome states we’re told to prevent in the first of the four exertions and to abandon in the second.

Encouraging wholesome states to arise

Our practice is full of teachings and activities designed to help make this possible, everything from the Eightfold Path to the four foundations of mindfulness.  Suffice it to say that applying ourselves to our practice is not different than establishing and maintaining wholesome conditions.  Dogen says that practice and enlightenment are not two, but in these early teachings, this is a linear path.  Mindfulness leads to investigation of phenomena, which leads to cultivation of energy, and so on.  Our more immediate ancestors would say that these factors arise together.

Maintaining wholesome states once they arise

There’s another very old text with something to say about restraining unwholesomeness and encouraging wholesomeness, and that’s the Dhammapada, which may be more familiar than the Mahavibhanga Sutta.  The  Dhammapada is a collection of short poems, considered to be one of the oldest written scriptures, which means it existed before Buddhism was divided into sects in India.  It contains a famous poem called “The Verse of the Teaching of All Seven Buddhas.”  

Not doing of any evil
Doing of all good deeds
Purification of one’s own mind
This is the teaching of all buddhas. 

Our tradition says there were seven buddhas before Shakyamuni, so this is what all of buddhas have taught.  The first two lines are pretty clear: don’t do bad stuff and only do good stuff.  The third line about purification of one’s own mind has different interpretations, but one of the traditional ones is going beyond good and bad.  That means not clinging to unwholesomeness but also not clinging to wholesomeness.  This verse contains two levels of teaching: we should do good and not do evil, and we should go beyond good and evil.  

In early Buddhism, the first part about good and evil was for lay people and the one about going beyond good and evil was only for monks.  Only monks could practice and go beyond good and evil, and they shouldn’t be involved with the world.  Laypeople stayed within the cycle of transmigration, and the only way out was to become a monk.  The role of the laity was to give money or other things to support the monks while they worked for Nirvana.  In the Mahayana tradition this doesn’t work, because it doesn’t make a distinction between monks and laity when it comes to awakening.  Thus somehow these two points of view had to be integrated: how to do good and not do bad and also go beyond good and bad.

The four exertions are telling us to restrain unwholesomeness and encourage wholesomeness, and of course we should do that, but as soon as we create a yardstick to measure good and bad, we form attachment to our good deeds.  If we ignore the difference between good and bad, that’s also a problem.  At Gate 55 we saw that Nagarjuna said when we attach only to the absolute perspective, that’s the sickness of emptiness.  We still have to live in world and what we do makes a difference.  How can we just do good without clinging to our good deeds, trying not to do evil, and not judging ourselves or others?  

There’s both an internal and an external aspect to this gate.  The oldest meaning of the four exertions is that in our personal practice, we try to understand the nature of our delusion and suffering so that we can prevent them from arising or liberate ourselves from them when they do arise.  Likewise, we try to understand the nature of wisdom and compassion so we can encourage or cultivate them in our minds and hearts and perpetuate them when they do arise.

However, we can also aspire to do these things in the outer world of the community.  We can try to head off suffering when possible and help those who are already facing difficulty.  We can also try to make good things happen in the world and keep wholesome activities going once they’ve started.  This is clearly a case of, as Okumura Roshi has said, needing both to take a step back to study the self and a step forward to help others.  In Living by Vow, he writes, We may practice zazen to pacify or calm ourselves, but that is not enough.  We have to engage in the activity of our day-to-day lives.
 
One of places we look for guidance about our actions is precepts, and indeed the Threefold Pure Precepts have something to say.  When we do formal meals, one part of our chant before we eat is:
The first portion is to end all evil
the second is to cultivate every good
the third is to free all beings
May everyone realize the Buddha’s Way.

Then we eat three bites from each bowl, and then eat as we please.  This chant is making a reference to the threefold pure precepts:

• embracing moral codes (refrain from unwholesome deeds)
• embracing all good actions (practice only wholesome deeds)
• embracing all living beings (live together with all living beings and harming none)

Now we can see what Dogen had to say about all of this.  If you come to our monthly ryaku fusatsu ceremony where we renew our aspiration to follow the precepts, you hear me read the Kyojukaimon.  It’s a text containing  Dogen’s teaching that was written down by his student Ejo.  There’s a statement about each of the three pure precepts:

The precept of embracing moral codes: This is the abode of the laws and codes of all buddhas. This is the root source of the laws and codes of all buddhas. 
Sometimes this is known as the precept of avoiding all evil acts.  It’s same as keeping bad from arising and  stopping it once it’s arrived.  By abiding by the precepts, we avoid doing unwholesome things.  Dogen says this precept is the origin of all of our precepts as well as the forms and rituals we use, so it’s not really a regulation or a rule but something that points to the reality of all beings because of interdependent origination.  We’re already completely connected with everything else, so it’s not possible to do something unwholesome and receive only a benefit ourselves while other beings suffer.  If we really understand that, we don’t feel moved to do bad things in the first place.  This is really at the heart of our practice—it’s what it means to be a bodhisattva, it’s what it means to understand the four noble truths, and it’s what drives our practice and determines how we move through the world.

Not doing evil is the root or origin of the Buddha’s laws and codes, and also the abode or manifestation of the Buddha’s laws and codes.

The precept of embracing beneficial actions: This is the dharma of Unsurpassable True Awakening (Anuttara-samyak-sambodhi). This is the way in which one should practice by oneself and the way in which one should lead others.
This is the same as encouraging and sustaining good.  Dogen says that doing wholesome things is itself awakening.  If we’re clear about the true nature of reality and the three marks of existence (interdependence, impermanence and no-self), then what arises naturally is wholesomeness rather than unwholesomeness.  Until we can see with the eyes of Buddha, we have precepts, guidelines and teachings that help us stay on track.

The precept of embracing all living beings: One should transcend distinction between ordinary beings and sages, and save both oneself and others.
Embracing all living beings is another reference to interconnectedness, ands doing good or doing harm affects the entire network of all beings, so making effort for good and restraining bad is working for the universe as a whole.  It would seem that all of this is pretty self-evident.  Do good, don’t do bad, and positive things will result.  However, as we’ve seen, it’s not that simple.  Dogen says we also have to let go of even our desire to step through this gate of the four exertions.

In his forthcoming book on the precepts, Okumura Roshi says: Any good or bad deed has its own result, and that’s not the end.  There’s an endless circle within good and bad, and in order to reach nirvana we should be free from the motivation of doing good in order to get a good result, or trying not to do bad things in order to avoid going into hell.  On that basis, we are endlessly transmigrating in a circular experience.

Dogen says that if we cling to emptiness as an excuse to do something bad because there is no distinction between good and evil, that kind of teaching is the suggestion of demons.  Not doing evil isn’t really a precept or a man-made rule, it’s awakening itself—a complete manifestation of reality.  Not only that, the four exertions aren’t something we do by ourselves.  They happen because we’re living together with all beings throughout space and time.

Dogen also gave a little talk on this that was recorded in the Eihei Koroku:
Don’t you see that the World-Honored One said, “You bhiksus already abide in the precepts.  Restrain the five facilties and do not allow yourselves to indulge and enter into the five desires.  For example, this is like a person who tends an ex, holding a staff and keeping watch so that it never violates the seedlings in others’ fields.  If we indulge the five senses, then the five desires will simply grow beyond all bounds, and go beyond all control.

Therefore, the descendants of buddha ancestors should not direct themselves on the evil paths of sounds and colors or fame and profit.  Not directing oneself toward sounds and colors means that you should immediately discard fame and profit, and make the five faculties sharp and clear.  To be sharp and clear means that once we hear that we should discard fame and profit and should discard self-centeredness, we immediately discard them.  Such practitioners can be said to enact great functioning and have superior qualities.  People who cannot yet be like this are called inferior vessels.  This being the case, how can we tend an ox?  How is the staff?  How are the seedlings?  How is our watching?  And how is the master of the seedlings?  Worldly people certainly do not know this; it is only correctly transmitted by buddha ancestors. [Talk  #383, p. 343]

So here we are, back again at managing the five hindrances and making right effort to watch where our energy is going the way a person tends an ox.  If we let the ox run wild, it makes mistakes and tears up the neighbor’s field.  If we pay attention, the ox is fine, the seedlings are fine, the neighbor is fine and we’re fine.  How can we tend an ox?  How is the staff?  How are the seedlings?  How is our watching?  And how is the master of the seedlings?

When Dogen says Worldly people certainly do not know this; it is only correctly transmitted by buddha ancestors, he’s telling us that the only way to take care of wholesome and unwholesome is to practice.

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:

• ​What do you think about Okumura Roshi's image of the self as an onion?  Are there other images that help you to understand the structure of the self?
• In your practice, how do you balance the need to navigate the world of form with the reality that everything is empty?
• How do you understand absolute truth and conventional truth?  How does your understanding affect your practice?
• What's the role of uncertainty in your practice?

Mind as an abode of mindfulness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we reflect that mind is like a phantom.
心念處是法明門、觀心如幻化故。

As we continue our consideration of the four abodes of mindfulness, we can begin to see how they’re helping us to understand the process of having an experience and then taking action based on that experience.  First we saw how the sense organs of the body have some contact with something, and out of that arises feeling or sensation; we decide immediately whether that feeling is pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  Now we get to the third step in that process: thoughts and emotions arise in the mind.

Mind in the case of this dharma gate is not just intellect.  There’s some variety in the way the original Sanskrit words for these four abodes are translated and understood.  For instance, “mind”  is sometimes translated “mental states,” so it isn’t just intellectual thinking but also includes the feeling tone.  This is the point where feeling or sensation gives rise to the three poisons.  We have a pleasant sensation and greed arises; we want more happiness, satisfaction, self-esteem or reassurance.  We have an unpleasant sensation and aversion arises; we want to escape from anger, hatred, fear or shame.  We have a neutral sensation and maybe ignorance is there; we don’t pay much attention to it or we ignore it.  Usually we’re rather unaware of this chain, and suddenly we may be completely hijacked by our response to something.  In a split second our whole outlook can change, so it makes sense to pay attention to how things arise in the mind and how those mental states are changeable and impermanent.

When we’re deep in the throes of misery, infatuation or some other mental state, it seems like that feeling is going to go on forever.  Sometimes that’s good and sometimes it’s not.  We like good feelings and happy thoughts, and don’t want to let go of those.  We don’t like bad feelings and unhappy thoughts, and we want them to go away as quickly as possible.  That’s all completely understandable in this human form.  Our practice isn’t telling us not to feel things, or to suppress our responses to the world.  We’re not completely and wholeheartedly living this human life if we’re doing that.  There are parts of our selves and our lives that we don’t like so much and we’d like to pretend they’re not there, but as bodhisattvas, that’s not an option for us.

Mindfulness of mind means we know what’s going on in our minds.  We know and acknowledge when we’re feeling attraction or aversion.  We recognize when we’re being pulled around by delusion.  We’re also aware of the general condition of our minds: distracted or focused, clear or confused.  It sounds pretty simple, like we shouldn’t have to be told about it.  Of course I know what’s going on up there.  However, when we start paying attention, we realize how much of the time things are happening that lead to action or affect our relationships,  and we’re completely unaware of what’s driving us.  Where did that come from?  What was I thinking?

Entering into this gate is a real chance to befriend ourselves, a real chance to become intimate with ourselves and the totality of our experience.  That’s not always easy or pleasant, and sometimes we don’t like ourselves that much.  It’s not easy to befriend someone you don’t like.  Especially if we’re stuck in habituated thinking and we’re having responses that are really familiar, we can just take for granted that those responses are the only possible outcome and that that process is permanent.

Taking up this gate is also a way to practice with an intimate experience of impermanence.  You’ll recall that impermanence is one of the three marks of existence, other two being interconnectedness and the emptiness of the self.  These three marks are characteristic of all conditioned things.  In other words, everything arises from causes and conditions, and everything is impermanent, interconnected and empty.  These three marks aren’t actually separate; they’re all really pointing to the same thing.

Uchiyama Roshi calls impermanence one of the undeniable realities.  He says that everything that has a life loses life, which applies not only to beings we might say are alive; even insentient beings are changing all the time, and so are our mental states.  He says:  Many people think that simply pursuing material happiness or riches is the most important in life.  But stand that way of life next to the reality of death and it completely falls apart.  When a person who thinks he is happy because of his material situation has to face death, he’s likely to fall into the depths of bitterness and despair.  If happiness means having plenty of money and good health, then by that very definition, you’re only going to hit rock bottom when it’s your time to die.  When you are faced with death, what good is being healthy or wealthy?  That is why all of these materialistic pursuits only end in despair in the face of the undeniable reality of death. (1)  

He’s giving one example of how quickly mental states can change.  One minute we’re happy because we have things we want, and the next we’re in a hell realm because those things have been lost.  Okumura Roshi says that when we’re unaware of impermanence and we’re not mindful of mind, then ego seems to be the center of the world.  When the ego tries to protect itself, then greed and anger arise.  The ego thinks it needs things in order to feel good, so we chase them.  When it thinks it’s threatened and becomes fearful, \we run away from things we don’t like. (2)

There we have the beginning of the three poisons as the root of our other delusions, and our bad karma when we take action based on them.  He says mental formations and the rest of the five skandhas can’t be controlled because there is nothing to control them.  The self is empty, and we can’t actually control our lives.  This body and mind aren’t possessions that we can control and operate as though we’re driving cars.  Thus he says that to see this body and mind as impermanent and unstable is to free ourselves from attachments and three poisons. (3)

If we try to fix the mind on any particular view or idea, that’s a problem.  Even clinging to the idea that mind is impermanent is a problem.  Clinging to mental states creates hindrances in our ability to clearly manifest Buddha nature and act skillfully because Buddha nature itself and awakening itself are constantly changing.  Uchiyama Roshi says we can’t shoot down and carry away a ready-made awakening like some kind of trophy!

Okumura Roshi takes up that teaching as well.  If you feel good or enlightened in certain conditions, and you cling to this experience, you are deluded.  You are already stagnating in enlightenmemt.  So we just open our hands and keep practicing.  This is the meaning of just sitting, of continuous practice.  There is no one who is deluded or enlightened. (4) 

Sometimes this teaching that the mind or mental states are impermanent can feel scary.  What do you mean that everything I think and believe is like a phantom?  Isn’t there anything I can rely on?  Deeply seeing the impermanence of small mind naturally leads us to some understanding of no-self.  If my mind is constantly changing and there’s nothing up there I can point to and say “That’s me,” then what is the self?  Who’s driving this bus?

Well, it turns out that the self is empty of a fixed nature.  On the one hand, we can distinguish individual people with individual psychological attributes and personalities.  On the other hand, it’s also true that we are not separate from the entire functioning of this reality, which includes all the other individual people and mental activity.  Thus in addition to paying attention to the small mind, the human psychological mind, we also have to pay attention to Original Mind or Pure Mind.  Original Mind is nothing other than awakening.  It’s simply the complete moment-by-moment functioning of the universe, or reality.  Entering into today’s dharma gate is not being separate from this Original Mind.  It’s being aware that our individual mental states are arising and changing and dissolving within Original Mind.  

So far we’ve considered impermanence of mind from a sort of modern Zen perspective, but in Dogen’s time there was quite an argument going on about whether or not the mind was permanent, as opposed to the body.  Somebody asked him whether the teachings being given by another teacher named Senika were true.  This teacher said that transmigration happens because we don’t understand that when the body dies, the mind goes on and returns to the ocean of original nature.  This was his teaching about how to be released from birth and death.

Of course, Dogen completely disagreed.  He said that Buddhism teaches that body and mind are not separate, so how can the body be impermanent and the mind permanent?  In fact, he says, the very mind that’s clinging to that idea is itself impermanent, and one other problem for him was that there was some sense that the body was impure and the mind was pure.  Anyway, he said that you can’t separate body and mind, or life and death, or samsara and nirvana, so using an idea like “mind is permanent” to escape from the wheel of transmigration makes no sense.

Here’s what Dogen actually says:

In the gate of speaking about impermanence all dharmas are impermanent, essence and material form are not separate.  Why do you call the body impermanent and the mind permanent contrary to the true principle?  Not only that, you should completely awaken to life and death as exactly nirvana. You can never speak of nirvana as outside life and death.  Furthermore, although you have the illusory idea that the understanding that mind is permanent and apart from the body is the buddha wisdom distinct from life and death, still the mind with this discriminating view is itself arising and perishing, not permanent at all.  Isn’t this illusory idea insignificant? (5)  

The challenge for us is that it’s fairly easy to see impermanence in the body; we don’t look like we did ten years ago.  We’ve gotten bigger or smaller, stronger or weaker, more wrinkled, less keen-eyed, and we can easily change the appearance of this body with a haircut or a makeup kit.  Mindfulness of the impermamence of the body is pretty easy.

Seeing the impermanence of the mind is a bit more difficult.  We may think we’ve always had the outlook we have now.  There are certain things we’ve always assumed are true, and we’ve based our worldview on certain beliefs and values.  One of the basic elements of spiritual health is understanding why we believe what we believe.  Having that kind of grounding feels stable and reassuring, and then something happens: we go to school or otherwise get some education, we grow up and things that were important to us in elementary school or high school are not so important now, and we have direct experience of something we’d only read or heard about.  Maybe our level of suffering rises to the point that we fall under the influence of people or organizations that seem to explain our fear, which could be wholesome or not.  It could be that we fall in with extremist groups, or it could be that we encounter the dharma and start to practice.  

Suddenly or gradually, our thinking and ideas change.  I know I don’t see the world now the same way I did before I started to practice, but I haven’t always been aware that my mind is changing.  I read an interview with a woman who had been involved with Q-Anon and eventually got out.  While she was part of the group, she met up with an old school friend, who expressed surprise at the transformation: “This isn’t the person I used to know.”  Until that moment, the woman had been unaware of how much her thinking had changed.

We live with the body and mind all day every day, so it feels like the same body and mind all the time.  We can see ourselves growing and changing and aging on the outside, but we don’t always see that change on the inside.  Impermanence of the mind in the long term isn’t always obvious.  That’s why it’s easy to think there’s a fixed self-essence or identity or soul that persists, something permanent that’s uniquely ours.  

Nishiari Bokusan, one of Sawaki Roshi’s teachers, said this, and he’s harkening back to Dogen’s disagreement with Senika:
The form of the body is born and dies in every moment and keeps moving without ceasing even for an instant.  The form of mind is said to be born and die fifty times within the cycle of a day and a night.  People ordinarily think that their body and mind are permanent because they use them continuously all their life.  But if you reflect on yourself intimately, what we call self-mind and self-nature perishes in each moment.  The self-mind and self-nature are annihilated when this body is destroyed.  There is no place where this so-called divine self abides.

In each of these essays on the four foundations of mindfulness, we’ve been considering Dogen’s piece about them 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. (7)

Where Buddha says “contemplating mind as impermanent,” Dogen says “contemplating mind as fences, walls, tiles and pebbles.”  I’ve been saying that I think what Dogen is doing is taking Buddha’s adjectives to describe each element and providing a concrete day-to-day example.  It’s not so easy to contemplate our minds—it’s like using our eyes to see our eyes—but we can also understand that being mindful of fences and tiles is the same as being mindful of mind.  Mind as fences and walls throws us back to Original Mind, mind as awakening that includes all dharmas and all beings.  The forces at work on mind (interconnection, impermanence and no-self) are also at work on fences and walls.  There’s no separation between mind and body, or mind and fences and walls.  When we see impermanence, we see that everything is impermanent.

The small mind is a reflection of the complete functioning of reality.  Previously we considered how the six sense organs come into contact with something and some sensation or feeling arises.  The mind is one of those six sense organs.  When it comes in contact with something, some sensation arises.  That leads to labeling and emotion and action.  We can think of the mind like a mirror.  Everything that passes in front of the mirror produces a reflection.  That image isn’t the thing itself, and the mirror doesn’t have any control over what passes in front of it and how the reflection is created.  It’s just constantly responding to causes and conditions and it’s in complete accord with those causes and conditions.  There’s simply complete functioning without separation.

Dogen says: All day and all night, things come to the mind and the mind attends to them; at one with them all, diligently carry on the Way.​ (8)  

If the mirror is warped or cracked, then the reflection is also distorted.  Maybe the image is a pool of still water that’s reflecting everything that goes by; when you throw in a pebble and the surface changes, so the reflection also changes and distorts.  Sitting zazen is getting that pool of water to become still again and accurately reflect this moment.  If we’re looking at distorted images, we take distorted actions.

Okumura Roshi points out that the impermanence of mental states means that we can start over when we make mistakes, no matter what they are.  If we are mindful of mind, we can transform our thinking and our views when we discover they’re not wholesome, or not in accord with reality.  It means awakening is possible. (9)    

Even in zazen, the mind comes in contact with something and there’s a response.  There’s a constantly changing picture show happening.  Mental states are coming and going even though we’re sitting silently and not moving.  That’s the “opening the hand of thought” part of the very familiar four things we do in zazen: taking the posture, keeping the eyes open, breathing deeply through the nose and opening the hand of thought.  Even in the midst of the activity of thinking, there is the stillness of nonthinking.  Thinking happens when there’s “me” separate from a thought and I’m in relationship with it—there’s a subject and an object.  Nonthinking is the brain or mind doing what it does and “me” not engaging with it.

Okumura Roshi says:  When we are sitting, we do not follow or get involved with our thoughts, nor do we stop them.  We just let them come and go freely.  We cannot call it simply thinking, because the thoughts are not pursued or grasped.  We cannot call zazen not thinking either, because thoughts are coming and going like clouds floating in the sky.  When we are sitting, our brain does not stop functioning, just as our stomach does not stop digesting.  Sometimes our minds are busy; sometimes calm.  Just sitting without worrying about the conditions of our mind is the most important point of zazen.  When we sit in this way, we are one with Reality, which is “beyond-thinking.”​ (10)  

This gate is about seeing and accepting the changability of the mind, even in zazen when we think we’re “supposed” to have some steadiness, calm or peace in our minds.  Sawaki Roshi says: You lack peace of mind because you’re running after an idea of total peace of mind. That’s backwards. Be attentive to your mind in each moment, no matter how unpeaceful it might seem to be. Great peace of mind is realized only in the practice within this unpeaceful mind. It arises out of the interplay between peaceful and unpeaceful mind.

The very impermanence of our minds is an important ground for practice, and there’s some subtlety there: it’s not that impermanence of mind is something we need to overcome.  It’s not an obstacle to anything: it’s the nature of reality.  Our practice is to see it deeply and completely accept and enter into it.  Contentment comes from not wanting impermanence of mind to be other than what it is.  Seeing and accepting the unpeaceful mind is the arising of peaceful mind, just as there is nonthinking in the midst of thinking.  We might wish that our practice would put our minds up onto a transcendant plane where we had a blissful mindstate all the time, where we could finally get some equanimity by leaving our changeable up-and-down mindstates behind, or avoid our worries about the emptiness of the self.  Well, of course, practice is not like that.  We practice by fully entering into the impermanence of mind.  To live only in the world of the absolute is Zen sickness.  That’s not where bodhisattvas live.  Impermanence of mind is a fact of our existence.  The question is whether and how we recognize and work with this undeniable reality.

Notes
(1) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 7.
(2) see Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 57.
(3) see Living by Vow, p. 127.
(4) Living by Vow, p. 163.
(5) The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. (2011). United States: Tuttle Publishing, p.161.
​(6) Dogen, E., Zenji, E. D. (2011). Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries. United States: Counterpoint Press, p. 64.
(7) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications. p. 287.
(8) Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary. (2018). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 36.
(9) see LbV163​
(10) ​Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary. (2018). United States: Wisdom Publications, p.81.

Feeling as an abode of mindfulness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we detach from all miscellaneous feelings. 
心念處是法明門、觀心如幻化故。

We continue our exploration of the four foundations of mindfulness with feeling.  This isn’t feelings as in emotion; it’s sensation.  Emotions are more complicated and happen farther down the chain.  Feeling is our response to physical or mental stimuli.  We decide that a sensation or experience is pleasant or unpleasant, and then we take some action to get more or run away.  It’s our simplest response to sensation or experience.

The sense of today’s gate statement is that when we pay attention to feeling, we perceive that feeling is illusory.  We come to understand how feeling arises and how we get seduced or enchanted by it.  Our view of the world is based on the feeling we’ve created and our interpretation of whether things are pleasant, unpleasant or neutral, rather than on the reality of this moment.  

Feeling or vedana shows up in all kinds of lists and processes in the Buddhist tradition.  It’s the second of the four foundations and also second skandha, among other lists.  Contact of a sense organ with a sense-object is the condition for feeling, and feeling is the condition of craving and aversion.  In other words, there has to be sense-contact before there can be feeling, and there has to be feeling before there can be craving.

Remember that in Buddhism there are six sense organs, and the sixth is mind.  When we have mental sensations, we decide whether we like them or not, just like we do for physical sensations.  Feeling is one of the most basic elements in human life and experience.  It’s near the beginning of the twelve-fold chain of dependent origination, the beginning of five skandhas clinging to five skandhas, and the condition or basis for the three poisons that lead to all the other kinds of suffering and delusion.

Pleasant sensations are associated with greed, unpleasant sensations with aversion, and neutral sensations with ignorance.  We can get hijacked almost immediately when we have some sensation and react based on habituated thinking.  Because of our conditioning, we can react without attention or intention, and our subsequent actions can be happening somewhere that’s a world away from the reality of this moment.  If I hear some bad news, my immediate feeling is I don’t like this!  I may act as though the news is worse than it is, or as though I didn’t hear it, or as though the information is wrong—all based on my habits and conditioning.  That decision happens very quickly and usually without the benefit of discernment or clarity.  What’s important is the feeling-tone that arises when my senses come in contact with an object, and whether or not I’m aware of what’s happening.

In a way, being driven by feeling, or not being mindful of how feeling arises and where it goes, is living in the animal realm of samsara.  You’ll recal that there are six realms in samsara: gods, humans, demi-gods, hungry ghosts, animals and hell.  Traditionally, one was literally reborn in one of these realms depending on your karma.  We can also see these six realms as six states or conditions through which we transmigrate in this life moment by moment.  

Being led around by impulse or instinct is characteristic of the animal realm.  Sometimes beings in this realm are seen as stupid and servile, unable to reason or use logic or reflect on their condition.  They prey on each other, and they’re used for food or labor.  When we’re caught up in sensation and feeling, we’re not thinking clearly and we’re not remembering the dharma and what Buddha taught.  We’re using only a very early part of our brains.  However, one reason that the human realm is considered higher than the animal realm is that we have the capacity to practice.  Unlike animals we are in a position to work with this gate and be mindful of feeling.

Early Buddhists taught that we should understand all feeling as painful because even pleasant sensations are temporary and seductive, and craving and aversion that arise from feeling are the basis of suffering.  In this human form, turning off the senses and the feeling that arises from sense contact isn’t really possible.  We can see why the Buddha said that life is characterized by sufrering.  Since we have physical bodies, we can’t avoid the constant chain of sensation, feeling, thinking, emotions, and writing the story.  No wonder early practitioners wanted to leap off the wheel of rebirth and to go a place where this process of arising doesn’t keep happening.

For us, all this doesn’t mean that it’s not OK to like chocolate cake better than parsnips.  It doesn’t mean that appreciating beauty or having loving relationships isn’t OK.  It doesn’t mean that all experiences should be neutral and bland.  The question is: are we being led astray by these split-second decisions about pleasant and unpleasant?  Can we enjoy and appreciate pleasant sensations and then let them go, without attachment?  Can we encounter unpleasant sensations without running from them or ignoring them or pushing them away, or is our clear vision of reality being clouded by our feeling response to sensation and the impulse to judge and label?  Instead, can we see that feeling is empty of a fixed self-nature just like all the skandhas?  Then we really know that feeling is unstable and impermanent and perhaps clinging to feeling is not so helpful.

So how do we live in midst of the karmic conditions of being human and yet not get swept away by the feeling-tone of our experiences?  There’s a difference between simply experiencing pleasant, unpleasant and neutral sensations and having opinions about them.  Uchiyama Roshi has a lot to say about this, including:

The most important point is to put all things, both happiness and unhappiness, enlightenment and delusion, on the same ground.  We should think of how we can live on that ground.  However, people today pursue happiness and try to escape from unhappiness, seek after enlightenment and try to eliminate delusion.  Since they think of life from such a point of view, their life goes off the mark.  We should live out the self that is only the self, in whatever situation we face. (1)  

To live out the self that is only the self is to see clearly what’s arising and take the most skillful action we can.  He says a big part of that is letting go of fixed narrow ideas about who we are, and we need to know that the true self is not an abstract thing make of sensation and feeling and thought.  He gives several examples, like not clinging to a feeling of frustration when we have to cook for the group and won’t be able to sit with everyone else, or getting upset because we’ve been asked to clean the toilet rather than the teacher’s room, where no one will see the good work we’re doing.

Uchiyama Roshi frequently said that all of our ideas and thoughts are just the secretions of our brains.  The function of the brain is to make thought, so that’s not a bad thing; we just need to not get trapped by our habits.  He says:  You might try looking at all the stuff that comes up in your head simply as secretions.  All our thoughts and feelings are a kind of secretion.  It’s important for us to see that clearly.  I’ve always got things coming up in my head, but if I tried to act on everything that came up, it would just wear me out. (2)  

Immediately we have sensations as a part of these activities that we judge pleasant, unpleasant and neutral.  Maybe they’re physical sensations: it’s hard work being a tenzo, being on your feet cooking all day.  It’s not so pleasant crawling around the toilet stalls scrubbing them out.  Maybe those sensations are mental: I don’t want to be in the kitchen while everyone else is in the zendo with the teacher.  I don’t want to be cleaning toilets when someone else gets the lighter weight job of vacuuming the tatami or dusting the altar.  There’s a reason that during the ango the shuso or head student is assigned to clean the bathrooms, and the tenzo is frequently in charge of taking out the trash.  It’s a reminder to people in higher-status roles that we need to put happiness and unhappiness on the same ground, and then actually live on that ground, as Uchiyama Roshi says.

He keeps pointing out that living based on feeling, or on chasing and avoiding, is living in a way that’s one step removed from actual reality.  There’s this actual moment, and then there’s the separation we create with deciding about pleasant, unpleasant and neutral.  Again, we can fully experience sensations in this moment as pleasant or not, but we do that without having an opinion about it, particularly “What does this mean for me?”  As soon as there is something we call pleasant, there is also something we call unpleasant or neutral.  We can experience something without giving it a label; as soon as we have a label, we have chasing and avoiding and suffering.

Uchiyama Roshi ties this quite directly to his big question: how do we balance peace and progress?  How do we take action in the world to carry out our vows and responsibilities and also not lose our equanimity and stillness and peace of mind?  He says:  Without being tossed about by personal feelings and ideas, just returning to the life of my true self, without envying or being arrogant toward those around me, neither being self-deprecating nor competing with others, yet on the other hand not falling into the trap of laziness, negligence or carelessness—just manifesting that life of my self with all the vigor I have—here is where the glory of life comes forth and where the life of Buddha shines. (3)

In fact, we can see this in his famous phrase, opening the hand of thought.  The word for thought can also include feeling, desire and judgement.  When we open the hand, we let go of all of that, all the way back to feeling that arises when we experience some sensation.  To live that way is to encounter everything without an agenda based on being a separate being.  The universal self isn’t the one deciding what’s pleasant, unpleasant or  neutral.  That’s the experience of being in this human form, but it’s not the whole story or the only possibility.

Let’s go back to the Dogen discourse from the Eihei Koroku I introduced at the last gate.  You’ll recall that because it includes all four of the foundations of mindfulness, we need to look at it again at each of these four gates.

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. (4)

This time it’s Buddha saying we should contemplate sensation as suffering and Dogen saying we should contemplate sensation as eating bowls.  At the last gate I said that my impression is that Dogen is taking the original teachings on the four foundations that describe them with adjectives and providing concrete examples of things we encounter.  At the beginning of this essay I said that early Buddhists taught that we should understand all feeling as painful because even pleasant sensations are temporary and seductive, and craving and aversion that arise from feeling are the basis of suffering.  Dogen makes reference to that here—contemplating sensations as suffering—but his view is that rather than labeling sensations as anything (pleasant, unpleasant, neutral, suffering) we can just experience what arises from our senses without deciding anything about them.

When we eat, there are myriad sensations coming in from all our sense gates.  Physcially we’re seeing food, smelling food, tasting food.  Mentally we’re remembering the last time we had this dish and comparing whether it’s as good as the previous meal.  What if we just experience the food without deciding anything about it?  In one way, what Buddha and Dogen are saying isn’t different.  They agree that feeling or sensation is the condition for craving and aversion and suffering.  However, Dogen suggests that maybe this chain of unfolding isn’t inevitable and that we’re not necessarily held captive by our human form.  Rather than disengaging from the senses in order to avoid feeling and eventually suffering, we can fully experience what’s happening, see it clearly and not get completely swept away.

In another of his writings, the Tenzo Kyokun or Instructions for the Cook, Dogen says we should use the ingredients we have without making judgements about quality or quantity.  Ed Brown wrote about this in forward to the translation of the Eihei Shingi by Okumura Roshi and Taigen Leighton.  Ed Brown is a longtime tenzo within the San Francisco Zen Center complex; you may have seen his many books on Zen cooking.

In writing about this part of the Tenzo Kyokun, he says:  Work with what you have to work with.  This is basic and most profound.  We cannot control what cones our way, so we find out how to work with what comes: ingredients, body, mind, feelings, thoughts, time, place, season, flavors, tastes.  This is counter to blaming one’s parents, one’s upbringing, society, others.  This is no longer concieving of oneself as a victim (Why me?  Why this?) or omnipotent ruler (Get it together.  Grow up.).  This is contrary to our cultural norm, which asks, “How do I get rid of anger (sorrow, grief, jealousy) without actually having to relate to it?”  To actually relate with thingsw, to move things and be moved by things, is the heart of intimacy, the way of growing in wisdom and compassion, peace and fulfillment. (5)

In this human form, there will be feeling that arises from sense contact; we cannot control what comes our way, so we find a way to work with what comes.  That means seeing clearly what’s arising and how, without blaming others or having an idea about what that makes me: a victim or a failure or a winner or a loser.  

This question about how to get rid of unpleasant sensations without really having to relate to them is interesting, isn’t it?  We don’t want to inquire into that feeling, or explore it; we just want to label it and get rid of it.  Yet if we’re not acknowledging feeling, we’re not completely living our lives.  Suppressing, ignoring or pushing away any aspect of our experience means we’re not fully alive.  As bodhisattvas, we don’t get the choice to live only the parts of our lives that we like.  We have to see and acknowledge all suffering, the suffering in this body and in the bodies of others.

Uchiyama Roshi reminds us that when we chase after the things our feeling dimenstion decides are pleasant sensations, we think we’re looking for happiness, but we don’t really know what happiness is.

Happiness is nothing more than what we feel when we have joy or pleasure in our mind.  What we call happiness is merely the condition in which our desire for self-satisfaction is fulfilled.  This is the root of our confusion: what do we human beings live for? 
. . . Human beings these days can be motivated only if we convince them that something will improve their standard of living and will fulfill their desire for self-satisfaction.  Nevertheless, happiness, a better standard of living or a prosperous society are concepts, just secretions of the brain.  We are living upside down if we find the meaning of our lives solely in fulfilling desires that are based only on secretions.  See thoughts just as thoughts.  See secretion simply as secretion, neither more nor less than that.  See everything as the reality of life just as it is. (6)

It’s important and interesting to consider that what seems like a pleasant or unpleasant sensation for one person or being is the opposite for another.  It’s easy to assume that we all experience suffering the same way, or that we all experience the same kind of suffering, but conditions that I think are the end of the world might make you very happy.  Let’s just say: we see this every four years at a national level.  However. this happens all the time in other ways.  Your friend tries to solve a problem that you don’t think is a problem, and you’re afraid the solution will actually make your life worse.  Someone you know lives in a way you find problemmatic, but she says this it’s a lifestyle choice and she’s just fine.  Your coworkers want you to join the union at your workplace, but your perception is that you can make better career progress on your own.  In all of these cases, well-meaning people are trying to ameliorate suffering, but others don’t agree on the nature of that suffering.  What’s an unpleasant senation for one is not for another.  We can’t assume that everyone agrees there’s a problem, let alone that everyone agrees on a solution.

When we think about caring for the earth, we quickly realize that because of interdependence, beings are in a delicate balance.  If we remove species we find unpleasant, even if we’re trying to help another species survive, we could be upsetting the balance.  How do we decide which species get to stay there?  Is it OK to base that decision on our own feeling?

Dogen’s Genjo Koan includes a famous image about flowers blooming, which we like, and weeds spreading, which we don’t like.  Even though we like flowers, they fade and even though we don’t like weeds, they grow and spread.  Uchiyama Roshi says that while we might not like weeds, farmers plow them into the ground as fertilizer.  While we might enjoy cherry blossoms every spring, dogs lie under those trees every day and don’t think anything about it.

For grasshoppers, weeds are their world.  When weeds spread they feel comfortable having a new living room.  When the frost in the desolate winter season kills the grass, the grasshoppers think that their Buddha Hall is destroyed, and they think, “This Buddha Hall is crushed and needs to be restored.”  Look at this.  Insects do not think that weeds are in the way.  For those who like it, “spreading” is not a problem. (7)

Notes:
(1) The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. (2011). United States: Tuttle Publishing, p.178.
(2) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 16.
(3) Ibid. p. 97.
​(4) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications. p. 287.
(5) Dōgen's Pure Standards for the Zen Community: A Translation of Eihei Shingi. (1995). United States: State University of New York Press, p. xv.
​(6) Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary. (2018). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 19.
​(7) Dogen, E., Zenji, E. D. (2011). Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries. United States: Counterpoint Press, p.38.

[52] The body as an abode of mindfulness is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] all dharmas are serene. 
受念處是法明門、斷一切受故。

This time we begin a four-part look at satipatthana, or the four foundations or arousings of mindfulness.  Each of the next four gates takes up an aspect: body, feeling, mind and dharma.

The Mahasatipatthana Sutra is a main source text for mindfulness practice in the early Buddhist tradition.  It’s about methodically cultivating the ability to pay continuous attention to our experience of whatever is happening in this moment.  It’s the continuous observation that’s important, because whatever we’re paying attention to is constantly changing; steady attention in the midst of change makes the mind concentrated and stable, and also observing qualities and characteristics whatever it is enables some insight and understanding 

Mindfulness is seeing all dharmas as they are with their true nature, before we have personal reactions and start writing stories.  This is seeing without making the distinctions that are driven by delusion, clinging and the three poisons, but it’s more than just observing external dharmas.  It’s also paying attention to what we’re doing and how we’re doing it:  remembering to practice, remembering the teachings.  Am I being skillful or not?  Am I making right effort?  Am I staying on the path?  Am I getting distracted by craving and aversion?  It supports the ongoing discernment and inquiry that we do in our moment-by-moment practice.

Mindfulness is important for seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action.  We need to settle into that place where all dharmas are serene, where we’re not pulled around by the distractions of the body, and we also need to use this body to actively work to liberate beings from suffering.  There is both quiet and activity.

It’s easy for us to sort of ignore the body unless it’s giving us trouble.  We stand, sit, walk and lie down without paying much attention to how that happens.  Kodo Sawaki said: When we’re not sick, we forget our bodies.  When my legs were strong, I walked and ran, forgetting my feet.  Lately, because my legs are getting sick and weak, I begin to appreciate that they’re really great things.  When we’re healthy, we forget our health and just work.  When we think of a certain thing, there’s usually something wrong with it.  When our mind and its objects do not arise, there’s nothing special. (1)

Uchiyama said the same thing in his commentary on the Bendowa:
It is good for your stomach when you forget the existence of the stomach and let it function well.  Also, suppose that you have a small injury on the tip of your little finger.  The finger you usually forget will suddenly become a big problem.  The best condition for all parts of the body is that you forget the existence of the body and let each part function in accordance with necessity in each situation.  This is called nonaction.  Just the ordinary reality of life that has nothing special is best. (2)

Here we have a paradox.  Mindfulness of the body has always been an important dharma gate in the Buddhist tradition, and yet Sawaki Roshi and Uchiyama Roshi are telling us that it’s best to forget the body.

Some early Buddhist practice emphasized analysis of things as way to understand that they are impermanent or unsubstantial.  Only conditioned things like the body can be intellectually analyzed.  We can have ideas about conditioned things and describe them, but we can’t do any of that with emptiness or awakening or pure mind; we can’t understand them that way.  We can analyze the parts of the body, the sensory inputs that come in through the sense gates, and we can look carefully at the relationships between these elements in order to try to understand the body and ourselves.  However, the elements and relationships change and we can see that the body is not a fixed and permanent self,  and we can’t analyze our way to understanding emptiness.  For that, we need direct experience.

For early Buddhists, when it comes to mindfulness with the body, the practice was to pay attention to the breath—not to change it, but to simply be aware of it: when breathing in or out with a short or long breath, to be aware that one was breathing in or out with a short or long breath.  Then you were to be aware of the experience of the body when breathing in or out and short or long, and then to calm the body while breathing.  You become aware of things that arise and dissolve in the body, and finally you contemplate how the body exists and give up clinging to anything.  Then you do the same thing when sitting, standing, walking or lying down (the four postures of the body),  knowing when you’re doing these things,  seeing how the body arises and dissolves, and ceasing clinging.

Next you move on to all daily activities: eating, wearing robes, using the toilet, moving around, paying attention to those and the impermanence of the body.  Contemplating the impurity of the body in order to destroy the delusion of beauty, you envision the body as bag of skin containing a collection of bones, muscles, sinews and organs, or imagine all the various fluids created by the body.  Finally you imagine the body as a corpse and all the various ways it decays or is eaten by animals and the bones scattered around.  All this is to break the enchantment with the body.

In the early teachings, practicing mindfulness in the body led to achieving each of the four dhyanas in Sanskrit or jhanas in Pali.  These are four stages toward understanding the true nature of reality and reaching Nirvana.  They mark a shift away from outward world of the senses.  The first is detachment from the external world and becoming aware of joy and ease that pervade the body.  The second is concentration that lets go of intellectual investigation.  The third is that joy dissolves, and only the sense of ease remains.  The fourth is that ease also dissolves and leaves only equanimity.  Then there are further spiritual exercises having to do with contemplating infinity and the unreality of things, and then even letting go of that.

Buddha said that developing mindfulness in the body was a sort of first line of defense against Mara, or delusion, because it resulted in skillfulness that comes from clear knowing.  He gives a lot of examples that compare someone without mindfulness in the body to something that can’t withstand invasion.  If you throw a heavy rock into a pile of wet clay it gets in easily, while a ball of lightweight string thrown at a hard wooden door just bounces off.  If you pour water into an empty water pot it goes in easily, while if the pot is already full the additional water just spills over.

If all that isn’t enough, the Buddha said there are ten benefits to practicing mindfulness in the body

[1] going beyond displeasure and delight
[2] going beyond fear and dread
[3] enduring unpleasant bodily feelings: cold, hunger, bug bites, hurtful language, various physical pains
[4] attaining at will the four jhanas or heightened mental states
[5] having supranormal powers like appearing and disappearing, walking through walls, flying through the air
[6] hearing both human and divine sounds whether far or near
[7] being able to read minds and knowing when someone is experiencing craving / aversion, delusion / awareness, distraction / concentration
[8] remembering his previous lives and circumstances of that
[9] seeing people’s karma and the conditions of their rebirth; why they were born in various circumstances
[10] existing in pure awareness

This isn’t an approach to practice that we particularly take up at Sanshin.  In fact, Dogen had some fairly harsh words for those who try to regulate themselves with these practices.  However, he is completely in favor of knowing that a long breath is long and short breath is short.  Of course, being Dogen, it’s not as simple as that.  He also says that his teacher Tendo Nyojo taught that whether the breath is long or short, it doesn’t come from anywhere or go to anywhere, so there’s actually no distinction between long or short.

Anyway, 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.  Yet we can certainly identify with becoming aware of physical sensation and seeing how we write the self-involved story line.  We can pay attention to how our own body is impermanent and interconnected and see how that also applies to everything else we encounter.  We’re intimate with the body as the ground of our practice, and that makes it a great dharma gate for investigating the truth of Buddha’s teachings.

Uchiyama Roshi says:  This self is not some fixed body, it’s constantly changing.  Every time we take a breath we’re changing.  Our consciousness is always changing, too.  All the chemical and physical processes in our body are also constantly changing.  And yet, everything temporarily takes a form.  This is our true self.

By paying attention to the body, we get to see firsthand how we live in the middle of both form and emptiness.  This body is real, and it’s also true that it’s just a collection of five skandhas that comes together for awhile and then dissolves.  If the body is not separate from the rest of the Buddha way, then it’s a really important part of our practice.  Also, of course, we have to pay attention to what the body is doing because it’s one of the three places where we create karma.

In Opening the Hand of Thought, Uchiyama Roshi makes the point that even though awakening is already here, we often live blindly.  We get caught up in thoughts and think they’re the only reality.  Our job as practitioners is to determine how to live in the midst of it all in a wholesome way.  He says:  The important thing is to find a sane way to live out the reality of life.  This is what a true spiritual practice is about: not spirit or mind separated from the body and the world, but a true way of life.  This is what zazen is—a practice of living out the fresh reality of life. (3)

We can see in our zazen that we take the posture and appear to be sitting completely still, but at the same time we’re breathing and blood is flowing.  We’re making micro-adjustments to the posture all the time just to stay upright.  There is form and emptiness, and there is stillness and activity.  We get to be personally aware of all of that and have that direct experience.

If we fast-forward from the early teachings in India to 13th century Japan, we see that the four foundations of mindfulness were important to Dogen.  He wrote about them in several places, and we can look at two discourses here from the Eihei Koroku.  First, number 284:

Although people in the past who left the world to become teachers said that the body and mind of ancient buddhas become attached to grasses and trees, they never said that [mindfulness of] body, sensations, mind and phenomena are the eyeballs of the ancestral teachers.  (4)

According to Dogen, early teachers said that ancient buddhas manifested concretely in the world just as grasses and trees do.   However, they never said that the four foundations of mindfulness are the very stuff of these buddhas, or that mindfulness of these four things is itself Buddha or awakening.  That’s a shift from doing body-based mindfulness practices in order to gradually achieve the goal of not clinging to the body and eventually to stop clinging to anything in the world.  Dogen says again here that practice and awareness are not separate from awakening.  We aren’t practicing in order to get a reward later.  Being mindful of the body from within the body is itself awakening or Buddha.  

Uchuyama Roshi frequently talked about the life force, which is the complete functioning of reality in this moment, and how we need to live out this true reality from within this body and mind.  That means that we recognize that there’s something more to our lives than being individuals within individual bodies.  He says:  The force that makes my heartbeat sends blood flowing through my whole body and allows me to breathe so many times per minute.  It is not something that I control or activate.  The power that performs these functions works completely beyond my thoughts,  Can we say this power is not me because it comes from beyond my thinking mind?  It is neither a “higher power” nor some “other power,” nor is it my personal “self-power.”  It is the energy of life.  

The other Dogen discourse we can look at for this is number 310:  
​
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 the same, you will lose your body and life. (5)

Because he’s talking about all four foundations, we’ll come back to this when we talk about each of the other three.  For now, let’s look at Buddha’s contemplating the body as impure and Dogen’s contemplating the body as a skin bag.  The pattern for each of these is that Dogen takes the Buddha’s conclusion about whatever it is and replaces it with a concrete example of emptiness, if you will.  Buddha says the body is impure so that practitioners will work on letting go of attachment to it.  It’s full of nasty, smelly stuff, it gets sick and dies, and the physical sensations that arise from it set off the entire 12-fold chain.  Clinging to the body is a real hindrance to achieving Nirvana.

Dogen, however, says the body is simply a collection of bones and organs contained within our skin.  We don’t have to mortify it or ignore what’s happening with it in order to achieve a goal.  In fact, as we saw at Gate 50, he considered the sense organs and what arises from them to be instances of prajna.  The body is simply the body.  Yes, clinging to it is not helpful, but it is not in itself impure; it’s part of this one unified reality, not outside of Buddha’s way, so rather than thinking, “Ugh!  Skin bag!  Not pretty.  Corpses are unpleasant.  Yuck!” Dogen says the body is just as it is, beyond what we think about it.  When we see it through the eyes of Buddha, we don’t need to get stuck in ideas of purity and defilement.  We can just pay attention to what the body is doing and what we’re doing with the body and see impermanence and interconnection.

Recognizing the body as the ground of our practice is really important.  This gate statement says that mindfulness of the body allows us to settle down in equanimity because all dharmas are serene.  When we encounter or experience things, we recognize that information is coming in through the sense gates; we’re forming opinions and judgements about those sensations, and taking actions and creating karma based on that.  When we see clearly what’s happening with the body, we can keep from being swept away and caught up in hindrances, and that includes both attachment to the body and hatred for the body.

Body image is a big part of our identity, but it’s difficult to see the body as it is.  Things would be better if only I was thinner or better looking or my back didn’t hurt.  Or maybe, I’m good looking or healthy, so I’m better than others and need to go all out to protect my looks and health or else I’m no good.  There’s lots of craving and aversion associated with the body, but when we have a clear view of the body we can better use it to take skillful action.

Dogen said to those serving as tenzo: Rejoice in your birth into the world, where you are capable of using your body freely to offer food to the three treasures.  We pay attention to the body not to withdraw from the world but to be bodhisattvas in the world.  In order to do that, we need to see everything as ourselves.  In other words, we need to see that our bodies are not separate from anything and they function together with the entire universe.  Uchiyama Roshi says that when we really get that mind and object are one, everything we encounter in our lives functions as a part of our bodies.  So where does the body begin and end?  Mindfulness of the body means mindfulness of all dharmas.  Seeing and carrying out all of our activities as though everything was a part of our bodies is a description of samadhi.  If we can see this way, then all actions of our bodies are practice, and everything we do is both an offering and a chance to study a dharma gate.

In the training temple there are gathas or short verses for many of the daily activities of life, verses for using toilet, shaving head, brushing the teeth, etc.  The form is to name the activity, say “I vow with all beings,” then name some relevant aspiration.

Washing the face, 
I vow with all beings 
to attain the pure dharma gate
and be forever undefiled.

Brushing the teeth in the morning,
I vow with all beings,
to care for the eyeteeth
that bite through all afflictions.

These are helpful reminders to pay attention to what we’re doing with the body, to see those activities as practice and as offerings.  Doing formal meals using oryoki is another good example, but really all of our forms are about behaving with dignity and decorum, maintaining awareness of what we’re doing and the effect of that on others.  It’s how we maintain harmony in the sangha.

Dogen wrote a book on forms and regulations in the training temple because these things are important dharma gates.  Being in a training temple is about paying attention with body and mind and practicing through the daily tasks of living.  It’s about not getting lost in thoughts and forgetting the real stuff of our lives.  Of course, we can do that wherever we are.  There’s always an opportunity to practice serenity and equanimity through paying attention to the body.  It’s a chance not only to have a personal experience of settling down in this moment, but also to bring peace to others by being aware of what’s coming in through the body and of the action of our bodies in the world.

Notes
​(1) Uchiyama Roshi, K. (2014). Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo. United States: Wisdom Publications, p.165.
​(2) The Wholehearted Way: A Translation of Eihei Dogen's Bendowa, With Commentary by Kosho Uchiyama Roshi. (2011). United States: Tuttle Publishing, p.191.
​(3) Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 39.
​(4) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications. p. 270.  
​(5) Dogen's Extensive Record, p 287.

[51] Realization of nonappearance is a gate of Dharma illumination; for[with it] we experience the truth of cessation.
無生忍是法明門、證滅諦故。

This “realization of non-appearance” is a very old teaching.  The Sanskrit word is anutpattika-dharmaksanti, the  recognition and acceptance that nothing really arises or perishes, which is another way to say that all conditioned phenomena are empty.  In later texts we encounter this as teachings about life-and-death or birth-and-death, arising and perishing or coming and going, or appearing and disappearing.  It shows up in early texts like the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra, a huge description of stages of the Yogācāra path to Buddhahood.  According to that text, this recognition of non-appearance is realized by bodhisattvas at the eighth stage.

Nagarjuna talks about this too in his Mahaprajnaparamita Shastra.  In that text, someone asks how a bodhisattva can possibly consider all beings to be equal when they’re so obviously different.  A cow has cow-nature and a horse has horse-nature, and those two things can’t be switched.  The same is true for good people and evil people; they have good natures or evil natures and those aren’t the same.  Isn’t it a mistake for the bodhisattva to consider all of these beings the same?

The answer is: yes, that would be a mistake if indeed there was such a thing as a fixed cow-nature or evil nature,  but for the bodhisattva there is no distinction to be made between identity and difference, or difference and sameness.  Then the text offers a verse:
Non-arisen, non-destroyed, unceasing, non-eternal,
Neither identical nor different, without coming or going,
Dharmas resulting from causes escape from all vain wordiness
The Buddha is able to define them; I pay homage to him.

Conditioned things don’t arise or perish, they’re not permanent or impermanent, not different or the same and don’t come and go.  Because they’re empty, they can’t be described accurately in words, but Buddha can see and understand what’s happening there.  The point is: the conditioned things we encounter are empty of any permanent self-nature and therefore cannot come and go.  We can’t put boundaries around them and describe them because there’s no place where we can say this thing ends and another one begins.  If things are not actually separate from each other, then how can we isolate one thing and say that now just that thing is arising or perishing, as distinct from anything else?

Another early text, the Prajnaparamita Shastra, shows how the bodhisattva even accepts that his or her body is non-existent.  That’s not easy to do; we live in this body and it’s pretty hard to give up our idea that we are this body.  If the body does not arise nor cease, then where does that leave us?  It feels like annihilation.

According to this text, when we accept the non-arising of the individual, personal body, there is only the dharmakaya, the dharma body of Buddha which is the same as Nirvana.  Within the dharmakaya there are no pairs of opposites.  There can’t be one side without the other, and yet we can’t distinguish between the sides.  At what point does dark stop being dark and become light?  At what point does young stop being young and become old?  At what point does living become dying?

The gate statement talks about accepting non-arising, but it’s implying that we also accept non-perishing since these two things aren’t separate.  Accepting one part of a pair of opposites means accepting the other as well, so if we accept birth or life or arising, we also accept death.

Uchiyama Roshi says: As long as we think we were born, we will die. Grasped by thoughts, people usually think only of living and put a lid on dying in order not to see it; they don’t understand true life. When we uncover the lid and see that life includes death, we can see true life clearly. As the reality of life, we are born and die within the total, interpenetrating self that has no birth and death. This is mahā—great, boundless vastness. (1)

In Japanese Buddhism, there is the term shoji 生死, or life-and-death.  There are several kinds of life-and-death in the Buddhist tradition.  One is the process of being born, growing older, becoming sick and dying.  This kind of life-and-death is an abbreviation for what Siddhartha Gautama discovered when he left the palace four times and learned about the four kinds of suffering, or dukkha.  

There is also life-and-death seen as one long period of time between our birth and our death.  This is life-and-death seen as moment-by-moment activity: this body and mind are being born and dying (or arising and perishing) moment after moment.  

There is also the day to day life of ordinary people who are transmigrating through the six realms of samsara because they’re pulled by their karma, in contrast to the life of the bodhisattva who is being led by vow rather than pulled by karma and is living in the world of samsara in order to save beings.  In other words, bodhisattvas aren’t living life after life because of their delusion and three poisonous minds but because of their work to liberate others.

Dogen’s teaching is that life and death in samsara is the life of Buddha, not different from nirvana.  He’s talking about arising and perishing before separation into samsara and nirvana.  In Shobogenzo Zenki he says:  Just understand that birth-and-death is itself nirvana. There is nothing such as birth-and-death to be avoided, there is nothing such as nirvana to be sought. Only when you realize this are you free from birth-and-death.

In order to understand his teaching on arising and non-arising, we have to understand his view of time.  It’s really a complex topic and I’m just going to say a few things about it here.  Something arises and seems to exist for some period of time and then perishes, but Dogen says that each thing exists in its dharma position at this moment; it has its own past and future, but each of those moments is independent.  

It isn’t that there is linear time in which a thing appears, grows, changes and disappears.  In this moment it’s in its dharma position, and there is some continuation that means that the thing functions like itself.  A dog doesn’t become a tree or something else in the next moment, but the position of puppy and adult dog and elderly dog are independent of each other.  The power of puppy is to negate puppy and become dog; that’s its function, and yet that puppy or dog is empty and has no fixed self.

It’s not so easy to understand, but this is how arising and non-arising works.  We have karmic influences that influence this moment, but this moment is new, fresh and independent.  The past is gone; we can’t take action there.  The future isn’t here yet; we can’t take action there either.  In Shobogenzo Shoji, Dogen says: It is a mistake to think that life turns into death.  Life is a position at one time with its own before and after.  Consequently, in the buddha dharma, it is said that life is itself no-arising.  Death is a position at one time with its own before and after.  Consequently, it is said that death is itself no-perishing.  In life there is nothing other than life.  In death, there is nothing other than death.  Therefore, when life comes, just life.  When death comes, just die.  Neither avoid them nor desire them.

Right there is exactly what this gate statement is talking about.  Realization of nonappearance is a gate of Dharma illumination; for[with it] we experience the truth of cessation.  According to early Buddhist teachings,  Buddha saw that the only way to the cessation of suffering was the cessation of rebirth.  In the world of desire, our craving and aversion intersect with impermanence to keep us tied to the wheel of samsara, but even if we manage to loosen those bonds and move to another of the six realms that we might like better, the very fact of our existence means can’t leave suffering behind.  This is the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths: existence is characterized by suffering.

According to these teachings, arising or life brings suffering with it.  If beings don’t appear or arise, then suffering ceases.  We can see now how Dogen interpreted this.  Non-arising and cessation of suffering isn’t about leaping free of wheel of samsara and going somewhere else or not existing at all.  It’s about understanding that non-arising is the reality of our moment-by-moment life experience.  In that way, Nirvana, or cessation, is right here in midst of it all.  From a place of awakening, we see that non-arising has already been accomplished right here.  Because things are empty of a permanent self-nature, they don’t arise as independent items we can label and distinguish.  Their dharma position has a before and after, but those are all independent of each other.  Something doesn’t become something else because there is no linear stream of time; there is only this moment, the eternal now.  When we see that, we’re released from the clinging that causes our suffering.

Again in the Shushogi, Dogen says: The most important issue for all Buddhists is the thorough clarification of the meaning of birth and death.  If the buddha is within birth and death, there is no birth and death.  Simply understand that birth and death are in themselves nirvana; there is no birth and death to be hated nor nirvana to be desired.  Then, for the first time we will be freed from birth and death.  To master this problem is of supreme importance. (2)

If the buddha is within birth and death, there is no birth and death.  In other words, if we’re seeing with buddha’s eyes, with the eyes of awakening, there is no arising and perishing.  Clearly, Dogen considers this a very important point if he says The most important issue for all Buddhists is the thorough clarification of the meaning of birth and death. He’s not just saying we need to understand our individual life stories.  We need to awaken to the non-appearance and non-perishing of everything in the universe.  We need to deeply understand how this works or we’ll never be free from suffering.

Dogen wrote a lot about this because it’s such a central teaching, particularly in his Genjokoan, the first fascicle of the 75-fascicle version of the Shobogenzo.  Okumura Roshi says that the main theme of the Mahayana tradition is seeing one reality from two sides, and that the main theme of Dogen’s Genjokoan is how to live and practice based on clearly understanding one-reality-two-sides.  Okumura Roshi explains that in the word genjo 現成, gen 現 means to appear, show up or be in the present moment, but it also has the feeling of something that was hidden and then becomes visible, a manifestation of something potential into something actual.  However, the larger view is that nothing is actually hidden and nothing really appears; this is the non-appearance of the gate statement.  Jo 成 is to complete or accomplish, so genjo is to manifest, actualize, appear or become.

Okumura Roshi says the term koan 公按 in this case is pointing to the intersection of difference and sameness, so this is all about two sides of one reality, seeing what appears or manifests in the intersection of unity and diversity, and seeing how things like arising and perishing and life and death are and are not opposites.

Nishiari Bokusan was a Dogen scholar in the late 1800s.  He says:  The gen spoken of here is not the gen that is related to hiding or appearing, remaining or perishing.  There is neither hiding nor appearing in the true genjo.  When we say that a hidden thing appears, it usually refers to the appearance that is relative to hiding.  In this dualistic sense, it is the phenomenon of birth and death.  But actually, in the realm of the true genjo, there is no hiding.  Thus there is no appearing. . . . What can be merely hidden or revealed is not the true genjo.  When we say there is no hiding or appearing, it means that there is no arising or perishing, no increasing or decreasing.  The dharma realm of heaven and earth as it is extends from the Kashyapa  Buddha in the past to Maitreya Buddha in the future, unceasingly through the past, present and future, regardless of the creation or destruction of the world. (3)  

Dogen starts the Genjokoan by setting up three important sets of opposites in our practice and tradition:
(1) delusion and enlightenment, 
(2) buddhas and living beings, and 
(3) life and death, or arising and perishing

First he says, There is delusion and realization, practice, life and death, buddhas and living beings.  Then he says, There is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no living beings, no birth and no perishing.  Then he says, There is arising and perishing, delusion and realization, living beings and buddhas.  

First we perceive our lives in the usual way: beings are born, things are created, they have some lifespan and then they die or break or become obsolete.  Then when we practice, we see that actually there is nothing we can distinguish as an independent being or thing that’s coming into existence and going out of existence.  Finally, we understand that reality is in the intersection of these two points of view, and that the actual appearing and disappearing is within non-appearing and non-disappearing.

Just like the Genjokoan, the gate statement is about understanding two sides of one reality and practicing with that understanding.  There is our own birth and death.  There is our experience of things coming into our lives and going out of our lives.  That’s real, and also there is nothing we can distinguish as arising and perishing and coming and going, so we are living and dying in midst of non-arising and non-perishing.

I think Dogen understood that even though this teaching is one of the most imporant in our tradition, it’s really difficult for us to understand.  He talked about it over and over and in various different ways using various different examples, and it keeps coming back to interconnectedness and impermanence.  In the Bendowa, he explains that interconnectedness and impermanence are precisely why there’s no soul or atman.  He says if we accept that all things are impermanent, how can we think there’s a permanent soul that goes on somewhere else after the body dies and never perishes?  If we accept interconnectedness, how can we separate the mind from the body?  Yes, body and mind exist in this moment, but they don’t arise or cease, and certainly not as separate from each other.  He says clinging to an idea about a permanent soul or spirit doesn’t free you from life and death; that kind of clinging is the cause of life and death.  (4)

There are a number of other examples in the Eihei Koroku where Dogen talks about arising or non-arising.  In one place, he says:
This very body and mind are not merely the five skandhas.  Our wondrous existence is most excellent, and should not be an object of desire.  Without coming or going, we simply respond to sounds and colors.  Further, we turn around from our center, and move out in the eight directions.  Negating all dualities, our feet are on the ground.  How could there be arising and perishing as our magnanimous energy pierces the heavens?  Although it is like this, do not say that killing Buddha after all has no results.  The genuine cause of attaining buddhahood is zazen. (5)
​
This very body and mind are not merely the five skandhas.  Our wondrous existence is most excellent, and should not be an object of desire.
This very body and mind are body and mind as complete manifestations of reality, beyond our limited view.  We shouldn’t be clinging to life as just something that belongs to the small self or something we own for our own purposes.

Without coming or going, we simply respond to sounds and colors.
In the world of non-arising and non-perishing, we carry out our function in our dharma position.  We do that with this body and mind, including the sense organs that take in sounds and colors, but without getting stuck or being pulled around by our karma.

Further, we turn around from our center, and move out in the eight directions.  
We see and act from broader perspective than just this body and mind.

Negating all dualities, our feet are on the ground.  How could there be arising and perishing as our magnanimous energy pierces the heavens?  
Even though we have a body and mind that functions in this world of samsara and life and death, we also see beyond opposites.  In that way we also live and die in Nirvana as bodhisattvas and we can work to liberate all beings.

Although it is like this, do not say that killing Buddha after all has no results.  The genuine cause of attaining buddhahood is zazen.  
Killing Buddha means going beyond our stories and limited ideas about awakening and being in the middle of real awakening itself.  That’s what we do in zazen.  Even though awakening is already here, even though we’re already beyond arising and perishing and non-arising and non-perishing, we practice in order to manifest it in the world.  As Dogen frequently reminds us, practice and awakening are not two, just like so many dualities that get both negated and upheld in this practice.

Notes

(1) Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary. (2018). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 57
​(2)  Engaging Dogen's Zen: The Philosophy of Practice as Awakening. (2016). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 69-70.​
(3) Dogen, E., Zenji, E. D. (2011). Dogen's Genjo Koan: Three Commentaries. United States: Counterpoint Press, p. 13.
​(4) Uchiyama, Kosho. (1997). The wholehearted way : a translation of Eihei Dōgen's Bendōwa with commentary. Boston, Mass. : Tuttle Publishing, p. 32-33.
(5) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications. p. 271
​

The sense organs are a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with them]we practice the right way.
入是法明門、修正道故。

The kanji here for the sense organs are a Buddhist expression.  It’s not the everyday term for normal five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch; this gate statement uses 入, a word for entry or entrance, to indicate sense organ.  We also find it in 六入 roku nyu, six entries; usually we say six sense gates.

Why six senses rather than the five we usually expect?  In Buddhism, mind is a sense-organ, which we’ll consider shortly.  There are other similar Buddhist terms for the sense organs.  Sometimes it’s six roots 根 or six places 処, but today we have the gateways of eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind.  These are called gates because stimulation comes in from outside—and we express our thoughts and emotions back to the outside.

In the Four Noble Truths, the Buddha tells us that the origin of suffering is craving, and in the twelvefold chain of dependent origination, craving arises from sensations.  Sensations result from the six sense organs being in contact with objects.  The eye sees something, the skin touches something, and sensation arises which is either pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.  When we think of mind as a sense organ, the objects of mind are memories, images, concepts or things we can think about.  Then we start writing a story and running after some things and running away from other things.

These eighteen elements—sense organs, the things they contact, and the sensation that arises—are the foundations for the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance.  Now we can see the entire process: the sense organ comes in contact with an object, a sensation arises, the three poisons arise, craving starts, and we have suffering.  Buddha said that to overcome craving and the suffering that results, we need wisdom.  We need to develop some insight into how the senses work and then exercise some care about how we use them.

In the first talk he gave after his awakening, the Buddha said:
Bhikkhus, these two extremes ought not to be cultivated by one gone forth from the house-life. What are the two? There is devotion to indulgence of pleasure in the objects of sensual desire, which is inferior, low, vulgar, ignoble, and leads to no good; and there is devotion to self-torment, which is painful, ignoble and leads to no good. 

This gate is taking us back to some of the most basic and important teachings in our tradition.  For example, we don’t indulge our greed by grabbing all the chocolate cake or gourmet pink lettuce, but we also don’t ignore the needs of the body by not eating properly.  The middle way is to take care of the body with reasonable, nutritious, appealing food without being caught up in the senses and going to extremes.

In fact, sensory desire is one of the five hindrances.  If we’re looking for happiness or comfort through gratifying the senses and clinging to the thoughts and ideas related to that, it’s hard to maintain focus or settle down while we’re always being pulled around by the senses.  We don’t have to ignore or suppress what our sense are doing, but we do need to pay attention to what’s happening—and what’s happening is that we’re creating suffering.  The enjoyment we get from gratifying the senses ultimately becomes suffering when those sensations go away.

There are several other important themes about the sense gates that show up throughout our tradition.  One is that the world we create using sense-data is an illusion.  Another is that sense gates and everything that goes with them both exist and don’t exist; these are teachings related to emptness.  A third is that although the sense gates lead to the three poisons and suffering, they are also instances of prajna or wisdom.

First let’s talk about the illusory world of the senses.  We’d like to think that when our senses come in contact with something, we get a pure and complete picture of that object.  Especially if it’s a neutral object and we don’t have any strong feelings about it, we think we perceive the reality of it.  However, it’s not possible for a couple of reasons.  One is that the human body is limited.  We can’t see all sides of an object at the same time.  We can’t see some colors of light or some frequencies of sound.  Okumura Roshi sometimes makes the point that humans can’t hear everything dogs can hear, so what seems quiet for us might be very noisy for dogs.

Another problem is that we immediately filter all of our sense data through our previous knowledge and experiences so we can categorize it.  That seems to be chocolate cake, which I know I like, or that seems to be a bat, and I had a bad experience once with a bat in my house, so I’m not so keen.  Our perception of something is our own perception; it’s not like someone else’s, and not like it might be in our own past or future.

Uchiyama Roshi says:  We assume that we are all living together in one commonly shared world.  However, this is not true from the perspective of the reality of our life-experience, which we learn about through letting go of our thought in zazen.  For example, when you and I look at a cup, we usually assume that we are looking at the very same cup, but this isn’t so in terms of true raw life-experience,  I am looking from my angle and with the power of my vision and you are looking from your angle and with your power of vision.  There is absolutely no way we can exchange nor understand each other’s experience.\

This is not only true for seeing; it is true of every perception and sense experience--hearing smelling, tasting and touching.  The world in which we actually live and experience life in its vivid freshness is a world that is mine alone and yours alone. (1)

It’s kind of interesting to consider that each of us is creating our own world moment by moment out of the things coming in through our sense gates.  My experience and your experience can never be exactly the same, and my experience and the true reality of all beings can never be exactly the same.  We have to use our senses to navigate the world, but we also have to see the illusion.  We can be fooled and we can make mistakes

There’s another issue with thinking that our perceptions are completely clear: the senses don’t work separately.  We don’t see something or hear something in isolation from the rest of the body’s functioning, and that influences how we experience these sensations.  Also, all the senses interact with each other and work together.

Okumura Roshi says: Usually we think we see things in the same way that a mirror reflects an image of an object.  We think the object is reflected in our eyes and that our eyes see the object.  Yet “seeing color and hearing sounds with body and mind” means that our lives and our bodies do not function in such a disjointed way.  It is really true that we see things not only with our eyes and year things not only with our ears.  The whole body and mind are involved in the activities of seeing objects, hearing sounds, smelling fragrances, tasting flavors and feeling sensations.

When having a meal, for example, all our senses are engaged.  We see the food’s color and shape with the eyes, smell and taste the food, and even hear the sound of our biting and chewing.  When we swallow, we experience satisfaction in feeling the food move down the throat until it settles in the stomach.  We may think of how delicious the food is and experience gratitude for those who prepared the meal, and we may think appreciatively of the immeasurable work that was involved in growing, harvesting and transporting the food.  These experiences of the meal are not simply discrete products of individual sense organs and their separate objects; we experience a meal engaging the entire body and mind. (2)  

We’ve got all of these sensations coming at us through the sense gates all the time, and we don’t usually stop to sort out what’s going on.  We just experience with the whole body and mind and plunge fully into this moment—and no wonder it’s so easy to cling to a sense of a fixed self and assume we have an independant separate self-nature.  When we look in the mirror, we see our unique faces with all the sense organs, and of course all that exists; no one would argue that point.  Then along comes the Heart Sutra, which says there is no eye, ear, nose, tongue, body or mind, and also no objects of those senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, object of mind), and also no sense-consciousnesses that arise when each sense organ makes contact with an object.  Yet we’ve just considered that these eighteen elements are the basis for the three poisons and all our craving and suffering.  What’s going on?

The teaching here is that these things have no independent, permanent existence: in other words, they’re empty.  We can identify physical sense organs, our sensations are real, and the objects we experience are real, but these don’t form the entirety of reality.  They’re partial, they’re influenced and distorted, and they change all the time.  

Not only that, who is it that thinks he or she owns these sense organs and the impressions that come from them?  We can really see five skandhas clinging to five skandhas here and now unreliable that dynamic is.  There’s a collection of aggregates called “I” that’s collecting distorted sense data, mixing it with various thoughts and memories and writing a story about the nature of reality.   Hmmmmm.  There are so many ways to go off the rails here.

We need to develop the wisdom to see what’s really going on so we can be skillful in these conditions.  Okumura Roshi has this to say:
Our picture of the world is our reality, but we should understand that it is distorted.  This is the meaning of emptiness.  Our mind is emptiness.  Our sense organs are emptiness.  Things outside us are also emptiness.  Everything is just an illusion.  The fact that we live with illusion is our reality.  When we really understand this and see how illusion is caused, we can see reality through the illusion.  Whatever we see, whatever we grasp with our sense organs and consciousness is illuson.  When we see this we are released from attachment to our limited view, to what we have , to what we think we own.  We may not become completely free, but we become less restricted by our limitations. (3) 

Again, we’re not saying that our senses and sensations aren’t real; they just don’t have existence that’s separate from anything else, and because they’re connected to each other and influenced by other elements around them, they can’t tell us the whole story.  

There are a couple of parts of the Sandokai that can provide some helpful illustrations.  The Sandokai is a poem written by Shitou Xichian in 8th century China.  In English the title is The Merging of Difference and Sameness, and in Japan we chant this poem every other day during morning service.  Sandokai is a poem about holding both individuality and distinctions and also the larger view of nonduality.  In a couple of places, it makes reference to the individual sense gates as real and functioning and yet also as not really independent or separate from each other or their objects or the entire network.

At one point it says, “Each sense and every field interact and yet do not.”  Each sense organ makes contact with objects and sensation arises, but also this never happens, because the sense organ and the object are not separate.  I have ears and I can hear music, and out of that a pleasant sensation arises, but also, there is no separate “I” with something to be distinguished as ears that are distinct from music, and no pleasant sensation that’s separate from the complete functioning of this moment.

Okumura Roshi says: [The sense organs of the body and mind and their objects] are independent and yet work together to create the world.  When we sit in this space, the space and my sitting become one.  When I cook in the kitchen, this body, my self, the ingredients the water, the fire, the untensils, and the space called the kitchen become one being working together.  When we play baseball, the whole universe becomes the world of playing baseball,  Our activity and the universe become one,  It all works together.  If we become angry, this whole world becomes the world of anger.  Everything around us makes us crazy and angry.  When we have a competitive mind, this entire world becomes the world of competition,  Our body and mind work together with the environment to create one world,  In this sense our mind is very important.  A change in our mind could change the whole world.  Our practice is important because it is not just the practice of our mind; it influences the whole universe. (4)  

If I’m working in my shop, seeing and smelling the wood, hearing the lathe going around and the chisel cutting shavings, and feeling the tools in my hand, I can identify each of these things as distinct from each other.  However, I can also see that they’re not separate from the entirety of the scene of what’s going on in the shop, and nowhere is there a separate me.  Early Buddhists said this is why there’s no permanent essence, atman or soul outside of the relationship between sense organs and objects; our lives consist only of these 18 elements.  Then the Heart Sutra came along to say even these things don’t exist as we usually think of them.  Finally, Dogen said they exist but are actually empty (impermanent and with no independent existence), and because of that, the sense gates are actually instances of wisdom or prajna.

That seems puzzling because we’ve just been hearing about how we can be led astray by the illusions of the sense organs and what arises from them.  How do we become able to see the senses as prajna, and how does all this relate to our practice of zazen?

Clearly, this isn’t a practice of the intellect, because even though we know some things about physiology, there’s still plenty we don’t know about what the brain does with the stuff that comes in through the sense gates, and how five skandhas cling to five skandhas and create a self out of that attachment.

Uchiyama Roshi says, Who is seeing?  How can we see?  It’s truly a mystery!  Scientists may explain the function of retinal cells, optic nerves and so forth, but no matter how much explanation is given, we cannot understand the most crucial point.  Eyes are eyes, and things are things, but how does the consciousness of seeing arise?  This is really mysterious and beyond our comprehensive thought.  The root of this wondrous phenomenon can only be called “life.”   Even if we put all the various parts of the human body together, such as head, chest of legs, and connect them, we still cannot create a human being.  Only if life functions there is there a human being.  The ground of such wondrous life is rooted in is prajna paramita.  

Dogen’s advice is that to hear the teaching of Buddha through everything we encounter every day.  In other words, to perceive objects clearly through prajna we have to free our sense gates from defilement by the three poisons.

Okumura Roshi says:  Even though we see things we don’t normally see them as the Dharma.  How can we get this true Dharma eye?  How can we really see the Dharma?  That is the point of our practice.  In the Soto Zen tradition we do monastic practice to transform our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body and mind.  The foundation of monastic practice is zazen, and all the activities in daily monastic life are the manifestation of zazen practice: chanting sutras, listening to Dharma talks, eating with oryoki, cooking, cleaning, even resting and sleeping.  Doing all these activities with awakening mind, being mindful and attentive--this is the way we transform our six sense organs into the true Dharma eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. (5)  

He goes on to say that most of us in the West don’t live in a training temple, and we need to find some other way to live with this same spirit.  We have to find other ways to experience what Dogen describes: seeing clearly and knowing that there is no separation between senses and their objects.  Of course, we can do this through all the activities of our practice lives: zazen, work, study and ritual.  We don’t have to be in a special temple or take on some particular status as practitioners.  As long as we’re taking in stimulation through the sense gates and working with it skillfully, we’re doing that practice.

When it comes to our zazen, of course our bodies and minds are fully functioning while we’re sitting.  We’re not turning anything off or suppressing anything that’s happening.  That means our senses are working: we’re smelling the incense, hearing the bell, feeling our cushions under us, and because we’re human we’re taking all those sensations in and creating a world.  Uchiyama Roshi called the appearance of the world as we perceive it through our senses the scenery of our zazen.  We’re aware of that scenery, but we’re not clinging to it or resting in it.  It’s coming and going like the clouds in the sky, and we’re not making anything out of it.

Okumura Roshi did a translation of Keizan Zenji’s Zazen Yojinki, covering things we should be careful about regarding zazen.  Keizan describes how we let go of everything during zazen and drop off body and mind:
Zazen is far beyond the form  of sitting or lying down. Free from considerations of good and evil, zazen transcends distinctions between ordinary people and sages, it goes far eyond judgements of deluded or enlightened. Zazen includes no boundary between sentient beings and buddha. Therefore put aside all affairs, and let go of all associations. Do nothing at all. The six senses produce nothing.

Another translation says “The six sense are inactive.”  In other words, we’re not fabricating stuff out of what’s coming in through the sense gates.  We’re making no distinctions between one thing and another because we’re letting go of thought and simply letting the universe function through us.

There’s another famous image for this: the stone woman and the wooden man.  These two come from the Hokyo Zammai or Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi, a 9th century Chinese poem by Dongshan Liangjie.  This is another one we chant every other morning in Japan.  The line says: the wooden man starts to sing; the stone woman gets up dancing.  In the context of the poem, these are two insentient beings preaching the dharma, which can only be understood by buddhas because the stone woman would be dancing without movement and the wooden man would be singing without sound.  It’s also making the point that in the broad view there is no distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings.  These two beings are simply and completely carrying out their function as wood and stone with nothing extra, just as the bodhisattva simply and completely carries out his or her vows with nothing extra.  Again, the universe functions through all of these beings.

Dogen, as is his way, picks up on this image and gives it a different context.  He gave a dharma hall discourse in which he said:
For nine years Bodhidharma bestowed a single utterance. Until now, people in various regions have mistakenly taken it up. Do you want to demonstrate it without mistakes? Eihei will again demonstrate it for the sake of all of you. The Iron Ring mountains surround Mount Sumeru at the center.  This is just exactly right. Thus it is demonstrated completely. However, is it possible to demonstrate it unmistakably? After a pause Dogen said: The jade woman recalls her dream of the triple world. The wooden man sits, cutting off functioning of the six senses.  Dogen descended from his seat. (6)
​ 
What does all this mean?  For nine years Bodhidharma bestowed a single utterance.  Tradition says that Bodhidharma sat zazen for nine years in a cave without saying anything.  Dogen says he communicated only one thing: thusness.  Until now, people in various regions have mistakenly taken it up.  No one has really understood what Bodhidharma was doing.  Do you want to demonstrate it without mistakes? Eihei will again demonstrate it for the sake of all of you.  Dogen’s going to show us how it’s done.  The Iron Ring mountains surround Mount Sumeru at the center.  This is just exactly right. Thus it is demonstrated completely.  This is a description of mountains in Indian Buddhist cosmology.  Dogen is just describing reality as it is.  However, is it possible to demonstrate it unmistakably? After a pause Dogen said: The jade woman recalls her dream of the triple world. The wooden man sits, cutting off functioning of the six senses.  Dogen descended from his seat.  The jade woman or stone woman is right in the midst of thusness or nirvana or awakening and is also right in the middle of the illusory world of samsara.  The wooden man is sitting zazen right in the middle of thusness or awakening, completely alive and functioning and doing exactly what Keizan described later in the Zazen Yojinki: not fabricating anything out of the sense gates.

We live in the world of the senses and we also go beyond the world of the senses.  The sense gates are an opportunity to study and investigate the world and our own moment-by-moment experience.  The challenge is not to get caught by our senses and lose sight of what we’re doing.

Notes

1) ​Uchiyama, K. (2005). Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice. Ukraine: Wisdom Publications, p. 128.
​2) Okumura, S. (2010). Realizing Genjokoan: The Key to Dogen's Shobogenzo. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 67.
​3) Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 133
​4) Ibid., p. 235.
5) Okumura, S. (2018). The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioner's Guide to Dogen's "Sansuikyo". United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 13.
6) Dogen, E. (2010). Dogen's Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 206.

Equality of all elements is a gate of Dharma illumination; for it obviates all rules for harmonious association.
大平等是法明門、斷於一切和合法故.

Today we continue to look as aspects of equality, or byoudou 平.  The kanji here say “great equality” 大平, which makes me think of equality in the largest possible sense.  However, if we don’t create separation, if we give up discriminative thinking, then we might also give up the guidelines and rules and laws we have in place to make it possible to live together, and this doesn’t seem to make sense.  If we don’t distinguish between a green light and a red light and we also throw out all the traffic laws, won’t there be chaos?  Yes, there will.  I suggest this gate is pointing us toward good and bad, going beyond good and bad, and what that means for living by the precepts.  This is a real problem, because when we misunderstand the equality of all elements, or going beyond good and bad, we can decide that ethics and morality aren’t important--that there’s no good and no bad, so we can do whatever we want.

We can also decide that people who keep precepts are good and anyone who doesn’t is bad.  It can be a way to justify discrimination against people like fishermen or leatherworkers who kill as part of their jobs, or against people who have disabilities or difficult situations if we think that this is simply their bad karma coming back to them.  That’s a problem for bodhisattvas who vow to liberate all beings from suffering and have compassion for everyone.

Because of wisdom and compassion, the meaning of the precepts changes moment to moment.  That makes it really difficult to know what is good and what is bad.  There is no fixed code of behavior based on the precepts.  One reason that we can’t pin down good and bad is impermanence.  Something that’s useful now might not be later on.  Okumura Roshi has frequently pointed out that a marker is useful as a marker until it runs out, and then when it can’t write anymore, we call this same object trash.  

Sawaki Roshi had a lot to say about good and bad and going beyond good and bad, for instance:  
What adults teach children are often nothing more than out-dated views. The view that good is good and bad is bad has already had its best days. Even a vegetable which was once good is inedible once it’s past its prime.  We’ve got to always be able to see things from a fresh perspective.

Defining a fixed code of behavior isn’t what the precepts are about.  They’re guidelines for carrying out bodhisattva vows.  They also describe what life is like when we live from a place of awakening, before our individual likes and dislikes kick in and when we see the equality of all elements.  That means deeply knowing whether differences are really true and whether or not they’re important.  Seeing the network isn’t enough; we also have to see the individual nodes in the network—oneness and diversity, or difference and sameness—and then we have to see which differences matter in this moment.  The difference between french fries and carrot sticks is important if you’re serving a meal, but the difference between long carrot sticks and short ones isn’t important.

In our daily lives, we can’t entirely go beyond good and bad and see only the equality of all elements.  We have to be able to make distinctions and choices.  Within our relationships with others and with the world in general, we have to decide what’s valuable or meaningful for ourselves and other beings.  There must be some rules or guidelines for how to live in a healthy, wholesome way in order to reduce suffering and have some peace and harmony,

If we see only this one unified reality and think that we only live in a world beyond discrimination or distinction, that’s a problem.  We can decide that going beyond good and bad means we can do whatever we want.  Going beyond good and bad can become an excuse for unwholesome or unskillful behavior.  Historically, this has been a problem in some Western Zen centers.  Teachers have made mistakes, sometimes really bad ones, because they and their students thought they were beyond good and bad.

Not seeing individuals can make it easy to ignore suffering, which is the opposite of what the bodhisattva does.  I recently heard someone on the radio talking about the opera Silent Night.  The story is that enemies meet in a ceasefire during World War I.  German, French, English, and Scottish troops talk and come to know each other, at least a little.  The composer, Kevin Puts, says “Once your sworn enemy ceases to be faceless, war becomes far less possible.”  War is a big impersonal complicated set of activities and circumstances, and within those larger circumstances, individuals are hurt and killed, so we can’t ignore the particulars and see only the broad perspective.  Yet this gate says that equality of all elements makes rules unnecessary, so what’s going on?

There’s a famous verse in the Dhammapada which I’m sure you’ve encountered: Not doing of any evil, doing of all good deeds, purification of one’s own mind, this is the teaching of all buddhas.  These Threefold Pure Precepts in a slightly different form are still part of our precepts ceremonies and ryaku fusatsu today.  Not doing evil and doing good are straightforward enough, but what about the third line about purification of one’s own mind?  It’s talking about going beyond good and bad, not clinging to evil but also not clinging to good, because any kind of clinging is defilement.

The Dhammapada is one of the oldest Buddhist texts, so we can see that this problem of good and evil on one hand and the equality of all elements on the other has been around since the beginning of our practice.  It’s still a conundrum today.  Sawaki Roshi said, “‘Do good, leave the bad.’   There’s no doubt about that, but is it so clear what’s good and what’s bad?  Good and bad go hand-in-hand.”  Yet we have to be able to distinguish wholesome from unwholesome, because wholesomeness lessens suffering and unwholesomeness makes it worse.  Actions that bring about pain to oneself or to other people are unwholesome.  Actions that brings about happiness, joy or pleasure to oneself and to others are wholesome.  This is a key aspect of the principle of cause and effect, which is hugely important to skillful action and is the basis of Buddhist ethics.  

No matter what our faith tradition, we start to understand good and bad from a very young age.  With toddlers, it’s all about self-interest: I won’t do this because Mommy will punish me and I will do that because I want the reward Daddy promised me.  When kids are a little older, ethical judgements are based on the damage done and the intent.  Breaking three glasses is worse than breaking one glass, but breaking them while helping to wash the dishes is better than breaking them while playing around.  After that, there’s some degree of social approval involved.  I won’t do this bad thing because I want people to like me or because it’s against the law.  By adolescence, with luck, we understand that there are things we don’t do because we’re morally obligated not to or because they’re simply wrong.   

However, chances are, until we started to practice, no one ever suggested we go beyond good and bad.  When we live in the world of good and bad, we transmigrate around and around the six realms based on whether we’re doing things that cause suffering or things that help liberate ourselves and others from suffering.  We also have the problem of our clinging to ideas about what good and bad are, particularly what’s good or bad for me.  When we go beyond good and bad to the equality of all elements, that’s Nirvana.  That’s purification of one’s own mind, as the Dhammapada said.  It’s also called awakening, pure mind or Buddha.

So how do we go beyond good and bad?  How do we let go of the yardstick without creating chaos?

We just do good without clinging to those good actions or comparing our good deeds with what others are doing.  Sawaki Roshi says, There is a bad deed, called “doing good.”  For some, doing good is just a decoration.  In other words, it’s just another way to shore up the sense of a separate self, even though we think our motivation is pure.  That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do the good action when we notice we’re clinging to it.  That clinging doesn’t necessarily negate the good action.  There are very few human actions that don’t have at least some tiny bit of self-clinging, which includes avoiding doing bad simply to avoid the unpleasant consequences for oneself.  Under that kind of thinking, I would decide it’s OK to steal your chocolate cake if somehow I wouldn’t get caught.  I would do whatever bad I wanted if only someone wasn’t standing there ready to punish me.  That’s the toddler phase, but adults fall prey to it as well.

Sawaki Roshi again: However much good they do, everything that humans do is bad. If you give, all day long you think, “I gave!” If you do religious practice, you think “I practiced, I practiced!” If you do something good, you never forget, “I did good, I did good!” Does this mean that we should do something bad instead? No, even when we do good, it’s bad. When we do something bad, it’s even worse.

If you do good, you start to work yourself up about everything bad you suddenly see in others. When you have done something bad, you’re quiet, because your own ass itches. People don’t only calculate when it’s a matter of money. In everything they do they try to bargain up or down. That’s because their body and mind haven’t dropped off. Only when body and mind have dropped off does this business not count any more. Dropping off body and mind means immeasurability, or limitlessness.

We need to understand that this teaching about doing good and not doing evil is not a man-made rule.  It’s a manifestation of absolute reality that we actualize with body and mind.  Body and mind dropped off means that the perspective of these five skandhas doesn’t get in the way.  We see with the eyes of Buddha; we see reality as it is before we poke our heads in.  A minute ago I said the same thing about the precepts—they’re not just rules but a description of living from a place of awakening.  This is the same thing

This is another way to say that practice and awakening are not two, one of Dogen’s most important points.  Awakening isn’t a thing or a state, it’s an activity.  It’s the activity of experiencing this moment from the point of view of Buddha, before the small self starts writing stories.  Small self is there, individual karmic circumstances are there, but they’re not the starting point of our experience and we’re not constrained and limited by them.  When we see the equality of all elements as well as individual characteristics, our actions are skillful and appropriate and beneficial without being “good” or “bad.”

Okumura Roshi says, When supreme awakening is expressed in words, what it says is “do not do any evil,” and in fact, not doing evil is awakening itself.  That’s our practice of receiving and following the precepts.

Doing good and avoiding evil isn’t something we do by ourselves based on our own labeling or good and bad, or a personal effort to get a result.  It’s something that arises together with the functioning of all beings.  It’s just the universe doing what the universe does.  It’s just complete practice in this moment.

Now, there’s a real but subtle difference between ignoring good and bad and going beyond good and bad.  It’s not simply using the intellect to convince ourselves that differences don’t exist or aren’t important.  Consciously letting go of preferences or just not acting on them isn’t enough.  We need to be in the place where we see them arising, and yet we’re not pulled around by them because we also see something bigger.  It’s not a matter of being offered tea or coffee and saying either one is OK even though we really want the tea.  Practitioners in dharma centers are sometimes surprised to find that the teacher has preferences.  The people who know what these preferences are sometimes feel like they have inside information, or like they’re seeing cracks in the great leader’s practice.  Wait!  Aren’t longtime practitioners supposed to see everything as equal?  All that stuff is just thinking.  It’s fine to like cherry pie better than apple as long as you don’t make a lot of suffering out of it.  

When we can see the entirety of what’s happening in this moment we naturally realize there’s no ground to stand on.  It’s fine to have plans, values and priorities.  It’s fine to study and commit to precepts.  However, in this moment, what’s happening?  We can’t even stand on the plans, values and precepts.  Sawaki Roshi says: Fortune and misfortune, good and bad – not everything is how it looks to your eyes. It’s not how you think it is either. We’ve got to go beyond fortune and misfortune, good and bad.

In zazen, we experience the equality of all elements without ignoring the particulars.  We let go of thinking, don’t act on the delusion that arises because of our karma,  and experience the world directly, without the filters or mediation of our conditioning.  Again, this isn’t something we need to learn or acquire.  We’re not sitting in zazen contemplating the precepts so that we can decide what to do when we get up off the cushion.  Sawaki Roshi says: Zazen is beyond good and evil.  It’s not moral education.  Zazen takes place where Communism and Capitalism finish.  In zazen there are no opposites, no competing factions, no discrimination between inside and outside or good and bad.  When we come to the end of that kind of separation, what’s waiting for us there is pure mind, awakening or Buddha.  It’s always there if we can just shift our focus from clinging to small self.

Zazen sits in the intersection between good and bad and going beyond good and bad, and the threefold pure precepts also sit in that intersection.  The version we use in our ceremonies is:  
- the precept of embracing moral codes
- the precept of embracing beneficial actions
- the precept of embracing all living beings

Okumura Roshi has explained that a late 17th century teacher called Menzan taught that these three precepts were a way to use the three poisons for good—in other words, to connect unwholesomeness and wholesomeness.  Embracing moral codes is the same as not doing evil.  We can use anger or aversion to harmful activities to keep from going down that path.  It helps us not to do unwholesome things that cause suffering in the world.  

Embracing beneficial actions is the same as doing good.  We can use greed to help us do as many good things as possible; there’s always one more good thing we can do.  Dōgen Zenji said in the Tenzo Kyokun: “You must not fail to add a single speck on top of the mountain of good deeds.”

Embracing all living beings is the same as going beyond good and bad or seeing the equality of all elements.  We can use ignorance to see beyond separation and discrimination and help all beings equally, not just ones we like or feel sorry for.

These three pure precepts also give us another way to look at the other ten precepts:
Don’t do evil: Don’t break the precept and engage in killing or stealing or some kind of misconduct
Do good: It’s not enough just to passively not do bad things; we also have to actively do good.  Don’t just not steal, be generous.  Don’t just not slander the three treasures, take refuge in them and care for them.
Go beyond good and bad: See what’s actually happening in this monent and what’s actually needed, and then  break precepts when necessary.  In other words, don’t cling even to the precepts because nothing is fixed.

The question we have to ask ourselves is not what is the good thing or the bad thing to do in this situation, but what will keep the network of interdependent origination in a healthy condition?  We take action with the same mind we have when we’re in the middle of in zazen.  When we’re sitting, we just sit, with nothing extra; that’s shikantaza.  When we’re helping, we just help, with nothing extra.  The “extra” we’re not adding is what we think good and bad are.  That extra gets between us and the pure mind or a direct experience of this moment.  Because this moment is the true reality of all beings, it includes both individual elements and the equality of all elements.