Prajñā Pāramitā sublimates all other pāramitā, including giving, patience, precepts, vigour and meditation. It’s the light in their lamps, as it were, which transforms them into pāramitās. Robert Aikten Rōshi called prajñā the raison d’être of the Buddha Way. We’ve seen already that he said that dhyāna is the form and method of zazen; and that samādhi is its condition. To that, we could add that prajñā illuminates dhyana, that it’s the output. Knowing a little bit about Zen, and hearing that prajñā is its raison d’être, I expect that there will be many people who think that prajñā must therefore be emptiness. It’s common for people to describe something as “very Zen,” when ideas of oneness and emptiness are suggested. So, we will need to unpick this idea to have a clearer understanding of prajñā and Zen. According to Har Dayal, the words, wisdom, insight, intuition, gnosis, transcendental idealism, knowledge, spiritual enlightenment have all been used by translators to convey the meaning of prajñā. The word, “wisdom” is used most often; and it’s perhaps the most accessible equivalent; although “insight” and “intuition” might also convey some of the flavour of prajña. In their approaches to this most important of ideas, the two dominant Indian sects in the early development of the Mahayana took differing views in their appreciation of prajñā. The Yogācārins explained prajñā positively, as knowledge and vision of things as they really are (tāthatā). The Mādhyamikas, on the other hand, discussed it negatively, denying any positive statement made about it. However, both sects revered the Prajñā Pāramitā, which became so important that it appeared in Buddhist iconography as the mother of all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Prajñā was originally said to be of three kinds: (1) learning through study; (2) reflecting on what is learned; and (3) embodied learning (that which is cultivated and expressed as practice-realisation). Dōgen Zenji hinted at the third, in his Genjō Kōan, when he said that realization is confirmed by the ten thousand phenomena. To covey that idea more immediately, we might say that the bodied learning of prajñā is awakened by the song of the blackbird outside the window, during zazen. This is how the Bodhisattva Kanzeon (“the one who perceives the cries of the world”) awakens to prajñā and responds to all beings from compassion. In the Heart Sutra, she is Kanjizai (“the one who sees through the fetters of a separate self”) declaring, “form is exactly emptiness; emptiness exactly form.” The full title of the Heart Sūtra is, of course, the Mahaprajñāpāramitāhridayasūtra (Great Perfection of Wisdom Heart-mind Scripture) and the Heart Sutra is a condensed exposition of prajñā paramita. Without expressly naming it, in the Ikka-no-myoju fascicle of his Shōbōgenzō, Dōgen alluded to prajñā as the one bright pearl of Master Gensa, who taught, “The whole universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl.” Asked by a monk how to understand this, he replied, “What use is understanding?” Later, Gensa himself asked the same question: “The whole universe in the ten directions is one bright pearl. How do you understand this?” A monk (the same one, perhaps) answered by mimicking Gensa’s words, and replied, “What use is understanding?” Gensa dismissed him, retorting that the monk struggled, “… in a demon’s cave on a black mountain”. The point here was that if a monk settled on an understanding which depended merely on his hearing and repeating the words of his teacher, he hadn’t digested Gensa’s meaning and come to his own understanding. Simply repeating the words of another, or relying on book knowledge, won’t cut through to the intuition of embodied learning. We’re stuck “… in a demon’s cave on a black mountain”. However, this is not to deny a value to received wisdom. We simply need to reflect on it, and be clear about our own understanding of its meaning. The fourteenth ancestor, Nāgājuna [c. 150 – c. 250 CE (disputed)], confirmed the importance of having a good understanding of the received teaching in his Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Ch24.v8-9): The Buddha’s Dharma rests on two truths: Conventional truth (samvrittisatya: dualistic relationships) and absolute truth (paramārthasatya; no dharmas arise) Those who do not know the distinction between these two truths Do not understand reality in accordance with the profound teachings of the Buddha. Although, however, we need to understand what the teachings are, we should be wary of literalism, which tends towards a one-sided position. A literal reading of the two truths doctrine would leave us choosing between two extreme options: either “everything exists” or “nothing exists.” Whereas, these ideas are meant provisionally. Existence and non-existence necessitate each other, having meaning only when set against one another. Prajñā lies in the gap between them. Therefore, in a crucial verse Nāgājuna continued (Ch. 24 verse 18): Dependent origination we declare to the emptiness. Emptiness is a dependent concept Just that is the middle way. It’s an easy mistake to understand non-existence, emptiness or śūnyatā as “nothingness” or an absolute “void” beyond and quite other than the conventional world of form. As Nāgājuna explained, however, the conventional world of form is itself emptiness. The phenomenal world is non-existent or empty because it is impermanent, interdependent and without any fixed essence, not because it’s a mirage covering some other paranormal realm. The impermanence, interdependence and absence of any fixed essence are the basis upon which it can be said that existence is really non-existence, or that beings are really no-beings. The practice of the prajñā pāramitā is to see this for ourselves; and to live from it, as the middle way between the extremes of existence and non-existence. Because the conventional truth of existence and the absolute truth of non-existence are themselves co-dependent, everything is described as, “thus” (or suchness; tathatā), neither one thing nor the other. To say this another way: prajñā is the ultimate truth that there can be no ultimate truth other than impermanence, interdependence and absence of any fixed essence. No ultimate truth could be taught without reliance on a conventional truth. Master Shuzan made this point and invited his audience to see the suchness of things when he held up his teaching stick, and said: “You monks. If you call this a teaching stick, you omit its reality. If you do not call it a teaching stick, you go against the facticity. Tell me what you call it?” The same point also emerges in case 8 of the Mumonokan, where Master Gettan said to a monk: "Keichū made a cart whose wheels had a hundred spokes. Take both front and rear parts away and remove the axle then what will it be?" Dividing something away from something else to find out what we’re left with is a Buddhist method of analytical insight to disclose the interdependence and lack of any fixed essence of the composite things making up our world. By over reliance on words and labels to manage the world around us we blind ourselves to the dynamic interrelationships that underlie the distinctions we make, and we miss the impermanence and provisional nature of everything that exists. In effect, we fail to see the suchness of the world as it is, and do not recognise that each fragment of the world is inextricably linked to and dependent upon the whole, in the manner of Indra’s net, which I talked about in connection with dhyāna pāramitā. Our fixation on words and labels for things leads us to expect that discrete entities exist at a fundamental level, always working in predictable and isolatable ways. In this way, we find ourselves lost in what the Buddha termed dukkha (dis-ease; suffering). There can be a problem with a reductive approach to analysing things into emptiness, however, if it leads into nihilism, or a passivity in which nothing exists, there is nothing to be done and nothing matters. It is not so easy to acknowledge that, if nothing is true, then everything is true; or that, if nothing matters, everything matters. If we deductively analyse into emptiness Master Shuzan’s teaching stick, Keichu’s cart and everything else, how are we to behave in the world? To put it another way, if we truly understand everything to be emptiness, why would we nevertheless look both ways before crossing the road? It’s obvious that however composite and impermanent existent things may be, they do exist to the same extent that we exist. Nothing exists in the way our fixation on words and labels might suggest it does. Nevertheless, we undeniably live discrete lives in a world where actions have consequences. Recognising this paradox, the cyberneticist Gregory Bateson (1904-80) sought for a holistic and pragmatic way to explain how things work that is closer to reality than the mistaken belief in a fixed and finite reality. He suggested that in the patterns of relationship that make up the world, differing things stand out to us, and work in recognisable ways, if they are, “differences that make a difference.” In other words, Shuzan’s teaching stick was not only different from other things in the room (a bell, for example), it stood out as a teaching stick because it made a difference as a device that Shuzan used for teaching. The same would be true of Keichu’s cart. If take the working of a cart holistically, we can see differences in the functions of the cart’s various parts (axles, spokes and wheels, for instance), and at the same time we recognise their overall performance in the functioning cart. Wheels don’t make a cart and nor do spokes or an axle. What makes a cart would be the difference between the wheels, spokes and the axle in a relationship that itself makes a difference, i.e., in their utility as a cart. The difference that makes the difference creates the idea behind the label ‘teaching stick” or “cart.” The meaning of the word “teaching stick” and “cart” and the utility of things themselves derive for the ecological context in which differences have come together as a teaching stick or a cart. Bateson’s position was that meaning derives from context, rather than the ideas, words and labels placed on things. The difference that makes a difference acknowledges that an assemblage is contingent, without denying its contextual significance. Whereas, the reductive analysis of a thing to emptiness from its component parts all too easily lends itself to an ontological misunderstanding the emptiness itself is somehow more real than the assemblage we’ve taken apart. The point that Masters Shuzan and Gettan were asking their students to understand was that reality (as impermanence, interdependence and no-self) and facticity (a stick, a cart or self) are not-two. Everything is suchness, neither at the extreme of existence or non-existence. This is prajñā. When we study the world around us, it turns out that everything is like this. We don’t live in a simple world of static and discrete things. We live in a complex, shifting and open-ended patterning and interplay of phenomenal differences, which we are only able to appreciate when we’re open-minded and receptive enough to put aside our convenience-driven fixation on names and labels, for instance during zazen. At such moments, we’re able to see how patterns repeat in different contexts, and how they affect and inform the way we live in the world and understand ourselves. We can glimpse this if we think about the human body. How does the body we have here and now relate to the body we had seven years ago? Or, how will it relate to the body of seven years’ time? What do the cells of the body have in common with the cells of the “same” body in the past and the future? Clearly, all these cells work in some kind of pattern, which repeats through time. But we make an error when we take the repeating pattern to be an unchanging self. In reality, there is only the ecology of differing cells arising, enduring for a time and passing. Inter-acting together, these differing cells make the difference which we call a self, or “me.” Isn’t this what the Heart Sūtra is also telling us? Prajñā, or the middle way between extremes, is to see through both fixed and reductive ways of looking at things, whether a teaching stick, a cart or a self, not in order to rest in an empty void, but rather to be able to move freely and flexibly within the shifting patterns and changeability of the world around us. In this connection, Aitken Rōshi reminded his own students to clarify and keep in mind the understanding that, in zazen, samādhi, the content of dhyāna, is not the same as the realisation of prajñā, the light of dhyāna. Prajñā, or wisdom, is the understanding from which we act after they we see clearly into suchness, in samādhi. In other words, the difference between dhyāna and samādhi that makes a difference, is prajñā. There is interdependency between posture, breath, stillness and insight, as in everything else, and a one-sided view of this relationship will blind us to its other aspects. The point is explored by case 46 of the Hekiganroku, in which Kyōsho asked a monk, "What is the sound outside?" The monk replied, fairly and accurately, "The sound of rain dripping." Kyōsho then said that, asked this question, ordinary people immediately separate themselves from the sound outside and give an analytical opinion of what they hear. In truth, they have to do this (as indeed the monk had just done), in order to communicate anything in words about the sound outside. The structures of conceptual thinking and language are dualistic and because of that they infer reality to discrete, severable and delimited ideas. Our ability to objectify in language is very useful, even vital, in its own context. I couldn’t talk or write without otherwise. However, it’s deceptive to mistake the intrinsically dualistic structure of thought and language for the content of dynamic experience. So, when the monk next asked how Kyōsho himself heard the sound outside, he replied, "I am on the brink of falling into delusion about myself." If, seeing the way in which we can be deceived by thought and language, we lean into a samādhi-based, absolute understanding that everything is empty or "one,” and that nothing ultimately exists, we’d would fall into another kind of confusion about the nature of self and other. After all, if nothing exists and it’s raining outside, what would it be that stayed indoors to keep dry, or took an umbrella to go out on a walk? We live in a world of differences, not oneness. The monk next asked, "What do you mean, ‘on the brink of falling into delusion about yourself’?" Kyōsho replied, "To attain the world of emptiness may not be so difficult, but to express the bare substance is hard." Kyōsho wanted the monk to understand that it’s relatively easy to sit passively in oneness and pretend that nothing matters; the performative practice of prajñā parāmita, by contrast, is hard to master. Whatever we think we’ve accomplished, we have to go beyond what’s passed and find prajñā afresh, in each new moment. Seeing the differences that arise at each moment we make a difference. This is a meaning of the mantrā at the conclusion of the Heart Sūtra: Gate [Learning through study] Gate [Reflecting on what’s learned] Para Gate [True Passing, embodied learning] Para Sam Gate [Playing Freely] Sources The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature by Har Dayal The Practice of Perfection by Robert Aitken Rōshi Shōbōgenzō (Genjō Kōan and Ikka-no-Myoju), Eihei Dōgen Zenji Nāgājuna’s Middle Way, Mark Sideris and Shōryū Katsura The Gateless Barrier, Zenkei Shibayama The Blue Cliff Record, translated by Taizan Maezumi Prajñāpāramitā Devi colorized.jpg; attribution: the SAT Daizōkyō Text Database Committee (led by Professor Masahiro Shimoda of the University of Tokyo), CC BY-SA 4.0
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It’s quite well known today that the Sanskrit word, dhyāna, was phonetically sounded in Chinese as Ch’anna. Shortened to Ch’an, dhyāna became Zen in Japanese. The word is usually translated into English as “meditation,” and therefore Zen is sometimes described as the “meditation sect” of Buddhism - a distinguishing characteristic which, for a number reasons, doesn’t really bear scrutiny!
Hebert Guenther pointed out, that according to the 21st Ancestor, Vasubandhu, the Sanskrit word dhyāna has an etymological root in upanidhyā: “to know directly and correctly.” Seen in this light, dhyāna is a method to know reality, directly and correctly. This is helpful. It draws out a connection between dhyāna and prajñā (insight, or wisdom). However, it also begs some questions:
As to the first question, Har Dayal argued that, along with a number of other important Buddhist terms, dhyāna is untranslatable into English. We must search for its meaning by examining the contexts in which the word is used, rather than looking for a single overarching English word that encompasses it. Dayal said that, although we will find dhyāna variously translated as “meditation” “trance” “ecstasy” “contemplation” “rapture”, all these words derive from a European rather than a Buddhist way of thinking. So, they tend to miss its meaning. For example, the most commonly used words “meditation” and “contemplation” are problematic because both have 16th century origins in the dualism of a thinker and an object of thought. The Latin words “meditātus” and “meditārī” intend that someone is meditating upon or making a plan about something. The words “contemplatus” and “contemplari” also require that someone considers, observes, gazes intently at, reflects upon, ponders, studies or views something. Dhyāna, by way of contrast, is a transcendent term, in which the thinking subject, the activity of thinking and the object of thought would be unified in a totalising experience of the here-and-now. For this reason, the translator C A F Rhys Davids argued that dhyāna does not mean “meditation”! To take another example, Edward Conze used the word “trance” as a translation of dhyāna, which term at least has the advantage that it less obviously posits the dualism implicit in the notion of someone thinking about something. However, “trance” is a problematic word for other reasons. It carries the unfortunate connotation of a dreamlike or semi-consciousness reverie, in which one is either wholly unresponsive to external stimuli, or at best only selectively so. C A F Rhys Davids, thought “rapture” (from the Latin word “rapiemur”, meaning “we shall be caught up”) or “ecstasy” (from the Greek “ekstasis”, meaning “to stand outside of or transcend [oneself]”) to be closer to the meaning of dhyāna. Like trance, rapture is less obviously dualistic. Unfortunately, however, the sorts of experience people would today associate with rapture or ecstasy tend to be prone to the same criticisms we can level at the word “trance,” or else they refer to “getting high” or an experience so expectational as to generate a dualism of another sort – that of a division between our mundane work-a-day lives and a paranormal state of being. Since English words for dhyāna all involve a compromise, another avenue of exploration is to study its translation into Chinese, as Ch’anna (禪那.). The Chinese resolution of the problem of translating the word dhyāna might help us in our own understanding of its meaning in English. In his book China Roots, David Hinton offers an interpretation of the ideograms 禪那 (Ch’anna). The second part (-na; 那), which was dropped from later usage, refers to tranquillity in the immediacy of consciousness. It points towards the immediacy of felt-presence in the here-and-now, to which the posture of dhyāna and attention to the breath direct us, when represented by zazen. Over time, ch’anna was shortened to the two ideographic elements making up the word, ch’an (禪). The left-hand element of Ch’an (礻) is the “radical,” which gives us the general class to which the overall ideogram belongs. Hinton and others agree that this particular radical denotes an altar, or a person kneeling before a shrine. Therefore, it’s a religious radical. It’s suggestive of spiritual practice, and more particularly in this case, the practice of seeing into Buddha nature. Hinton says the radical points towards a practice in which we see that we are much more than our thoughts and memories. Although he puts a Daōist twist on the meaning of the ideogram, his basic point is clear: the ideogram indicates the deconstruction of the dichotomy of a subjective thinker, the thinking process and an object of thought (which, as we’ve noticed, the original European meanings of words like meditation and contemplation fail to capture). Moreover, as Hinton explains, a very early meaning of the ideogram 礻 was that of, “landscape,” conveyed, imaginatively, as “mountains and rivers.” Therefore, the altar, or the person kneeling before a shrine, in the radical for ch’an (禪), is directed towards a spiritual significance to be found in landscape, mountains and rivers, or the sensual world around us. Returning to our starting point, we could now say that the practice of dhyāna is to know mountains and rivers directly and correctly, not as divine fetishes of some kind, as they are in themselves. According to the implication of the Chinese ideogram, ch’an, the word dhyāna asks us to examine the world around us, including ourselves, and know it directly and correctly, as-it-is. The right-hand element of the ideogram for Ch’an (單) can be read in at least two interesting ways. It can mean a net used to capture animals (in this case, indicating that our untamed emotions and volitions are tethered to the practice), or it can refer to solitude (conveying the idea that each of us is existentially alone in our own seat of consciousness). In the combined symbolism of solitude and a net there may be more than a hint in this ideogram of a practice to be taken up as a whole-hearted, body and mind, personal quest that harnesses holistically our corporeality and our feelings, volitions and perceptions, as well as the faculties of reason and discernment (with which the original European ideas of meditation and contemplation were preoccupied). From this perspective, we can see why Dōgen Zenji referred to zazen as a body and mind practice, as opposed to a practice in which merely the mind is used to work on the mind. It may be additionally possible to read into the symbolism of the net implicit in 單 an acknowledgement of dependent origination, or the interdependent conditions of existence, represented in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra by Indrā’s Jewelled Net (which is described in this way by Francis Cook): “Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering "like" stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.” So in summary, the method of dhyāna, is directing us towards a spiritual practice, which we have to undertake for ourselves, so that we may know directly and correctly the nature of reality, ourselves and our world, by bringing together the totality of what we are in the tranquil felt-presence of the here-and-now. We could add that “to know directly and correctly” is what Dōgen Zenji called the practice of dropping body and mind. If we leave aside our reservations about the word, “meditation,” we can use it loosely, because it’s becoming clear why Robert Aitken Rōshi called dhyāna, “the form and method of zazen” (which is another word that also tends to get translated as “meditation”). If we examine Dōgen’s Fukanzazengi, we see that he set out the form and method of zazen, so that we can be in no doubt what dhyāna looks like. In considering the second question (how is dhyāna practised as a pāramitā?), it may be helpful to explore the word samādhi, which is another of those awkward words to translate. Aitken Rōshi observed that although the two words dhyāna and samādhi and often used interchangeably, if dhyāna is the form and method of zazen, then samādhi is actually its condition. The condition of zazen is something we only understand by doing it. Dōgen Zenji offered us almost nothing about the condition of zazen in his Fukanzazengi. He gave only an outline of hishiryõ (“beyond thinking”) and left it to us to discover the condition that arises from zazen. We’re expected to immerse ourselves in the method of practice, and find out how zazen tastes (as it were) for ourselves. This makes practice very personal, and once appreciated, our body and mind recollection of it is intuitive. When it dawns on us what zazen is all about, it feels as if we’ve come home to our original dwelling place, like the prodigal son returning from a distant land. Samādhi, the content of dhyāna, is not a trance. Nor is it an attempt to block out everything in favour one particular thought or idea. Although samādhi is often translated as “concentration” (which does tend to suggest we should put all our energy into to blocking out everything but the breath, or a kōan), it’s more like an open gateway into being. If we understand samādhi merely as concentration, we’re liable to close our minds to the mountains and rivers – the total picture of what are lives are in each moment. For this reason, Chögyam Trungpa Rimpoche told his students, “The practice of samādhi does not involve concentration”. Since we’re only ever breathing in and out right now, focussing attention on the breath can be helpful, because it grounds us in the life-moment. There is a calm and stability which comes from concentrating on the breath. It also discourages an over-romanticisation of Zen practice, making us patient with our endless tendency to become distracted. Kif we’re working on a kōan like Jōshū’s “Mu!” we also need to put a lot of concentrated energy into it. It does no good, however, to make concentration a yardstick to measure how well we’re doing in zazen. It’s not an end in itself. Unless we’re investigating our total life situation, we’re simply performing what Trungpa Rimpoche called, “mental gymnastics.” Taizan Maezumi Rõshi said that samādhi is to be “one” with the practice. When we’re one with our practice we abandon the tendency to draw a distinction between who we are and what we’re doing. When there’s no distinction there’s no need for a lot of effort to get a practice method “right” because holding to the method we are authentically what we as we sit in zazen. To practise dhyāna as a pāramitā we simply need to authentically be ourselves, at one with what we’re doing. In Fukanzaengi, Dõgen called zazen the Dharma gate of peace and joy, which that hints that the practice dhyāna is to relax into the posture of Zen, and let ourselves be as we are. Practising in this way, there is an openness, peace and precision to our being, which requires no artifice or wilfulness from us. The ego gets out of the way, and ordinary things shine out in own their intrinsic givenness. We can now begin to see the sense in which we might know reality, which was our third question. To know reality directly and correctly is to allow all the circumstances of our lives to arise, abide and pass away, just as they do. From this, it also begins to be clear what knowing reality indirectly and incorrectly might involve. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon to find that we experience reality as a battle with ourselves, to settle our bodies and minds into enough calmness and tranquillity to sit serenely in the here-and-now. Reality, to us, can be a fight with our ego minds, in order to concentrate on what we are “supposed” to be doing. We struggle to concentrate because we feel distracted; and the struggle to concentrate just becomes one more cause of distraction. Trunga Rimpoche wryly observed that we entangle ourselves in a battle, in which ego fights to overcome ego! We can only end the battle through an insight into this fact. The fight to overcome distraction by concentration is itself the cause of our struggles with the practice. To begin to see this is to begin to reality directly and correctly. To know reality indirectly and incorrectly is to know it only as an idea of what it ought to be like, and a fight against the way it actually is. For there to be glimpse of reality itself we need to stop struggling, and rest in the here-and-now. This is a realisation that Trungpa Rimpoche said comes about when gaps in our exhausting effort to concentrate begin to appear. In the beginning, these gaps may only last for a short time, after which the ego-driven fight kicks in again, and we begin arguing with ourselves once more about how well we’re doing at zazen. This is why prolonged practice on, say, sesshin is so valuable. We wear out our habitual thinking patterns, like old shoes, to borrow one of Trungpa’s metaphors. Wearing out our habituation patterns of behaviour, so that gaps in them begin to emerge, and it’s possible to see more serene and less self-centred ways to appreciate our being is an aspect of dhyāna as a parāmitā. It’s a parāmitā because the work is endless. Knowing mountains and rivers directly and correctly is difficult because they are always receding from view. Understanding that is prajñā, the insight of panoramic perspective, which we will talk about next time. Sources The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature by Har Dayal The Practice of Perfection by Robert Aitken Rōshi Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa Buddhist Meditation by Edward Conze China Root by David Hinton The Etymology of the Chinese Ideogram ‘Ch’an’ (禪) (Published in The Middle Way, Journal of The Buddhist Society, London - Aug 2011 Vol. 86, No. 2 - page 171) https://wenshuchan-online.weebly.com/etymology-of-the-chinese-ideogram-lsquochrsquoanrsquo-31146.ht Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra by Francis Cook Fukanzazengi By Eihei Dõgen Zenji
In The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature, Har Dayal said that vīrya is a word generally associated with vigour, power strength, heroism, prowess, valour, fortitude, courage, firmness and virility. It’s related to the word vīra, meaning “hero,” and Mahāvīra (Great Hero) is one of the epithets of the Buddha. When speaking about the pāramitās, Dayal advised translating vīrya as, “energy.” However, Robert Aitken Rōshi preferred to use the word, “zeal” in his book The Practice of Perfection and I heard Genpo Merzel Rōshi refer to it as, “effort.” I remember that Tenshin Fletcher Rōshi once used an analogy, from a children’s song by Rosalie Moscoe called, “I Can Do It Train” – “Chug, chug, toot, toot. Can I do it? I can do it” – in light of which, maybe Dayal was right that overall vīrya best left untranslated! Vīrya used in the pursuit of meritorious principles or the “Good” and its opposite would be indolence or sloth (kauçidya) – i.e., for instance, that familiar preference to go back to sleep on sesshin when bell rings for dawn zazen. Other traits that vīrya overcomes, including harmful habits and addictions, boredom, indecision, despondency, despair, discouragement, self-contempt and fearfulness. Through a basic grasp of vīrya that we learn how so many of the apparent obstacles in life (such as, for example, nervousness about speaking in public or worry about performing badly in a test) turn out to be mirages that dissolve when we put an end to prevarication and set our course. When we apply vīrya, we try, and very often we discover that we can do many things that we had supposed we could not. The kōan, “Count the stars in the heavens” illustrates all of this. It’s resolved through vīrya, rather than by protesting its seeming impossibility. This is what Tenshin Fletcher Rōshi wanted people to understand from the I Can Do It Train. When we try, we find that we can; and when we persist in trying, we find that we get better. Vīrya pāramitā, however, is just to try, without concern about whether we’re improving. The four Bodhisattva Vows embody vīrya paramita, because although we know that they’re impossible to fulfil, we vow to try anyway. As Aitken Rōshi said, “The human being by nature is inadequate, practises zazen inadequately, realises true nature inadequately. This is Vīrya Pāramitā.” We have such a tendency to prevaricate and fret about doing many things that it can come as a great surprise to discover actually doing something will make us happy. Contrary to what er often think, it’s not that happiness comes as the result of having something so much as that the very effort is happiness. When we find pleasure in doing something we find that our enjoyment makes the activity sustainable. I think this realisation hints to us that our Zen practice needs to be sustainable. Its’ not good to go in for extreme asceticism, because it’s not sustainable, as the Buddha himself discovered. There is a related question about food that arises here. The Buddha ended his extreme asceticism by eating a milk gruel. It’s interesting in this connection that the Japanese word vīrya becomes shōjin, which Aitken Rōshi said is identified etymologically with the diet of mountain sages. He said that in this context, vīrya is about living modestly and simply, as if one were already a sage. I think it’s also pointing out that if we want to have a sustainable practice, we need first to make sure that our basic needs are met. In the last talk, I was discussing ksānti pāramitā as an endless spirit of engagement with everyday life, just as it is. Here I would add that it’s vīrya, which overrides our tendency to give up or become distracted, that enables us to repeatedly and endlessly engage patiently with our lives. It’s vīrya that makes any pāramitā practicable, as a pāramitā. If there’s no vīrya, there’s no pāramitā. Moreover, if there’s no vīrya, there’s no practice and no realisation. According to the Mahāvastu, it’s better to live one day of full vīrya than 100 years of indolence. We won’t keep working on a difficult kōan or consistently put ourselves through a sesshin schedule or a daily meditation practice without vīrya. Another way Tenshin Fletcher Rōshi explains vīrya is to stress the importance of “showing up”. If we continually make the commitment to come to sesshin, to sit daily or to come to a class, we are actualising the Tathagata – another of the Buddha’s epithets (one who “thus comes”) – and the strength of our continued commitment is sedimented into us, for our own benefit and for the benefit of others practising with us. In the perfection of the precepts (sīla pāramitā), vīrya is that aspect of practice that understands the maxim, “Falling down seven times, getting up eight.” Shunryu Suzuki Rōshi talked about “repetition”. I don’t think that he intended “repetition” to be his translation of the word vīrya, but it strikes me as a very important aspect of it. We don’t learn and transform ourselves in sudden and dramatic ways very effectively. Likely as not, we will only traumatise ourselves or burn out through being overzealous. Rather, it’s through a spirit of continual, careful and observant repetition, which does not allow itself to give in to tedium and stagnancy, that the best and most resilient work is done. Through vīrya we’re able to layer good characteristics into ourselves and weaken bad ones, but we do that within the greater context of knowing that we are not perfect beings, and that our perfection lies in owing that fully. Sources The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature by Har Dayal https://rosaliemoscoe.com/track/3580850/i-can-do-it-train The Practice of Perfection by Robert Aitken Rōshi Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
Ksānti is radical openness. It translates into English as tolerance, forbearance, patience or endurance, which as a performative practice in everyday life, necessarily entails an honest acknowledgement of the way which we sometimes want to hold onto a false sense of certainty about things. In the face of uncertainty and the ultimate incomprehensibility of everything, ksānti is without a fixed personal position and has nothing to defend. Therefore, it is at the same time intuitively tolerant of, but nevertheless the antithesis of, anger, hatred, aversion and ill-will, which are all self-serving. We could understand the perfection of ksānti as the sort of forbearance that the earth possesses, as it endures all of our abuses. It was exemplified by Master Kyōrin Chōon in the Blue Cliff Record (case 17), when a monk asked him, “What is the meaning of the Zen Founder’s coming from India?” (The question asks about the purpose and value of the practice of Zen, which the Indian monk Bodhidharma, transmitted to China). Kyōrin replied, “Sitting for a long time becomes tiring.” He didn’t mean that sitting for a long time in zazen doesn’t work, or that Bodhidharma somehow failed in his mission, or even that Kyōrin himself sat only for the purpose of getting tired! All these interpretations would be linear. They would be based on the premise we do A in order to achieve B. Sitting in zazen, by contrast, like Ksānti Pāramitā, is not practised in order to achieve something else. In the perfection of patience, we don’t practise patience in order to get some reward for being patient; and in the practice of zazen, we don’t sit for hours on a cushion in order to achieve some higher state of consciousness. We just do them, and the doing of them is its own reward. When we “just do” anything, we endure it unconditionally, allowing whatever we do to be just as it is; and to do something unconditionally, we must do it wholeheartedly. Doing a thing wholeheartedly, we lose ourselves in the doing of it, because we are not concerned about what it is that we’re doing, or why we are doing it. When we do something for a particular purpose it is very difficult to be whole heartedly involved, because we are worrying about what we are doing, whether we are doing it in the right way and whether it will achieve our desired purpose. Our lives run more harmoniously and smoothly for us when we simply and patiently do things for their own sake, rather than as transactions to achieve something else. Just doing something for its own sake is the kind of perfection of endurance that Master Tozan Ryokai was pointing out, in case 43 of the Blue Cliff Record, where a monk asked him, “When cold and heat visit us, how should we avoid them?" Tozan answered, "Why not go where there is neither cold nor heat?" The monk asked, "Where is there neither cold nor heat?" Tozan said, "When it is cold, kill yourself with cold. When it is hot, kill yourself with heat." We can understand Tozan to have meant that we should simply throw ourselves into each situation, as we find it, and then the resistance that we may hold about a particular situation will dissipate. However, ksānti pāramitā is of much broader application than the mere endurance of cold and heat and, as the writer Barry Magid points out, so too is Tozan’s meaning in case 43. In both the kōan and ksānti paramita, Magid sees as an active surrender to the nature of reality at work: “We are talking about cold and heat as examples of what we are afraid we can’t handle and of all the likes and dislikes that practice is meant to confront.” This koan is asking about dualism and its avoidance. Tozan torments us with the promise of a place beyond it. Is there such a place? The koan is about surrender, saying yes, to reality, not transcendental fantasy.” There is nothing passive about Tozan’s teaching or ksānti paramita as the active acceptance of reality. Rather, what’s important here is a radical openness to whatever arises, which enables us to move beyond the dualisms of right and wrong, opposition and harmony. In that openness, all polarities, are transcended, because no particular understandings, personal perspectives or presumptions are presupposed. If ksānti paramita were passive it would degenerate in a mindless indifference in the face of circumstances, which Magid would call a passive submission, rather than an engaged surrender. To see Zen practice passively is to treat it as a lifeless collection of data that we can accumulate, or an inert and showy badge of merit that we wear, rather than to own it as the nature of our lives in each in moment. Master Tenkei Denson referred to the stasis of passivity as the “stagnant water of transcendence”. The writer, Dr Herbert Guenther, pointed out an inherent problem with the practice of ksānti paramita as too ready an acceptance of a life difficulty, in the belief that, by accepting it, we attain to some kind of spiritual realisation amounting to a final resolution. He said, “acceptance, though giving us a point of view from which to look out into reality, at the same time has a fossilising effect [upon us].” I remember that Maezumi Roshi used to say, “Don’t be satisfied!” and I would say that, if anything, it’s maybe better to postpone the stage at which “acceptance” sets in. Ksānti paramita is not a quality that is perfected once and for all, and then put in a box as something that’s been “ticked off.” It is an endless spirit of engagement with everyday life, howsoever it may be. The understanding of Ksānti paramita as wholehearted, unconditional and continual surrender is captured by the saying, “Four hundred years in the human realm is one day and night in Maitreya’s heaven.” Dōgen Zenji discussed this saying in a short talk contained in his Eihei Kōroku. He related how the ancient Indian monk Vasubandhu once descended from the inner palace of Maitreya (the Buddha yet to come) and was asked by his brother, Asanga, about this saying. With reference to it, Asanga related that Maitreya lead 500 billion heavenly beings to completely realise ksānti paramita. Asanga didn’t understand. He enquired of Vasubandhu what teaching Maitreya had given to the 500 billion heavenly beings. When Vasubandhu said that Maitreya expounded the teaching of “just this,” Asanga immediately got the point. Discussing this story, Dōgen asked his listeners how the everyday phenomena would be the sublime teaching of “just this.” No teaching devices, or religious trappings, will ever reach it, he said. Nevertheless, flowers open and close and dust, having settled, and be swept away anew. His final comment captures the teaching of “just this” in radical openness of ksānti paramita: “The oceans of the three thousand lands completely become autumn. The bright moon illuminates and chills the coral.” Sources The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Literature by Har Dayal The Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record, translated by Thomas Cleary Nothing is Hidden, The Psychology of Zen Koans, by Barry Magid (ch. 19) Philospohy and Psychology in the Abhidharma by Herbert V Guenter (p240) Dōgen’s Extensive Record, A Translation of the Eihei Kōroku, by Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okamura (Bk 2.180)
In The Boddhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature, Har Dayal explains that the term, Sīla (which we translate as, the Precepts) is rooted in repeated practice. To me, the idea of something repeated has the connotation of continually coming up short. We’ve seen already that Pāramitā has a meaning of the “most distant, highest and most excellent,” according to Dayal, which suggests that which is out or reach and very remote from the place we in which we find ourselves. The need for repeated practice conveys a hint that we do something over and over because any idea of completion is far removed the actuality of what we’re able to accomplish at any given time. Therefore, we could say that Sīla Pāramitā, the perfection of the precepts, must lie within our imperfect and inadequate observance of the precepts, day by day! As a practice, our observance of the precepts will always come up short, no matter how hard we try. Therefore, there is a humility to Sīla Pāramitā, which a “holier than thou” attitude of moral superiority would entirely miss. In so far as can be known, Sīla has been a foundational element of Buddhism since its inception. Together with Samādhi and Prajñā (concentration and wisdom), Sīla is included in the earliest threefold formulation of Buddhist practice (Triśikṣā). The Venerable Ashvagosha said that a Buddhist without Sīla was an imposter, belonging neither to the lay nor the monastic sangha. I think his point was both rhetorical and practical. It was rhetorical in that he was saying something about the ethical standards to be expected of Buddhist practitioners. It was practical because, in the absence of Sīla, one really can’t be a Buddhist in any socially acknowledged sense without participating in the ceremony of receiving the precepts (which, in Zen, we call Jūkai). In India, becoming a follower of the Buddha involved leaving home and becoming a wandering mendicant and the right of passage that marked this transition was the ceremony of receiving the precepts. It’s interesting, in this connection, that the Japanese imperial court belatedly recognised the importance of the ceremony of conferring the precepts about 100 years after Buddhism first entered Japan. Chinese Buddhist precepts masters had to be invited from across sea to visit the main Japanese temples and formally transmit the precepts to the home-grown monks who were already there. Prior to that time, most Japanese Buddhist monks were apparently self-ordained and self-taught. Those monks who received a formal transmission of the precepts from the Chinese masters became a disguisable sangha, the Ritsu-shu, set apart from those who remained endogenously Japanese in calling themselves monks. Irrespective of organised religion however, a kind of moral code seems to be essential to any civilisation. Throughout world cultures common basic principles have emerged for ensuring that people are able to live together in relative peace and harmony. The practices and beliefs of the Stoics for instance emerged from an enquiry into the grounding of such principle. Much later, Immanuel Kant would argue that they are embedded in his “Categorial Imperative”. There is also the Golden Rule of reciprocity, which is well known from the New Testament: “In everything, do unto others as you would have others do unto you” (Matthew; 7:12). Confucius made a similar rule (Analects, 15:24) “Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” Versions of the Golden Rule also appear the philosophies Plato and Aristotle and, of course, in Buddhism. The Dhammapada reminds us that since all beings fear death and cherish life anyone who considers will this will not kill cause harm or death (10:129 & 130). If the Golden Rule fails to avail, everyday morality appeals to personal considerations such as gain and loss, fame and obloquy, praise and blame and pleasure and pain. These rational means of encouraging minimal levels of morality are, of course, backed up the criminal law, where necessary. When however rational devices fail there are always the metaphysical threats and incentives offered by religion to fall back upon. Mahayana Buddhism imagines various different states of purgatory, each different, and like Dante’s rings of Hell, adapted to match the immoral behaviours of its various malefactors. Buddhist hell realms differ from the Christian conception of Hell only in as much as nothing in Buddhism is permanent, apart from Nirvana itself. To the early Buddhist, fear of punishment would probably have been rather an immature reason to be ethical. A basic tenet of early Buddhism, including the so-called Hinayana (“lesser vehicle”), would have been that the precepts should be followed in order to maintain the calm and clear conscience, free from the passions of greed, hatred and ignorance, and necessary for serene meditative concentration and the cultivation of insight into reality. From this Hinayana perspective, the precepts are followed out of self-interest. They are a rational gateway to personal liberation; or, if that is too difficult, they are grounded in a metaphysic that by minimising painful karma in this life, a good rebirth is assured for the next life. Turning to the Mahayana, Har Dayal identifies two characteristics of a more sophisticated motivation underlying Sīla. First, he says, there is Apatrāpya, which is a conscientious wish to avoid personal shame and social censure. Shame arises from a sense that one is coming up short in one’s practise of the Pāramitās, and it seems that Sīla Pāramitā is motivated by this quality, at least in the beginning. Secondly, there is Hrī, which is likened to an inner mentor that encourages a purity of intention coupled with a disinterested modesty with regard to oneself. It is rather different from an ordinary understanding of self-respect, in that self-respect would leave unanswered questions about the nature of self. In our own Jūkai ceremony we receive ten grave precepts. The first five (not to kill; not to take the not given; to refrain from sexual misconduct; not to speak falsely; and, to refrain from being intoxicated) are the oldest, the second five were later additions (not to speak of others errors and faults; not to elevate oneself while depreciating others; not to be stingy with the Dharma; not to indulge anger; and not to defame the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha). If the Hinayana perspective is that we should avoid breaking the precepts at all times, the Mahayana perspective is that the purpose of Sīla is the liberation of other beings rather than oneself and that therefore it may sometimes be necessary to break a precept for the welfare of others. We decide for ourselves whether breaking a precept would be casuistry or a genuinely well motivated decision. I set out below some examples of circumstances in which Buddhist commentators have argued that it might sometimes be appropriate not to follow the letter of the precepts. Some are redolent of the Paul’s statement in Corinthians 9:22, “I have become all things to all men, that I may by all means save some”; they would also account for the enlightened layman Vimalakīrti’s choice to consort with prostitutes and ne’er-do-wells in the Vimalakīrti Nirdeśa Sūtra.
I find some of these examples less persuasive than others. Dayal argues that such reasoning is grounded in a belief that the end justifies the means. From a narrowly Mahayana perspective, he might be right, in that an objective is to save all beings might justify a means that compromises the applicability of general precept. At the time Nansen killed the cat, he may have thought that the end justified the means in this way. However, from a Buddhayana perspective, we would need to keep in mind that there is no end to justify any means. There is only continuous practice-realisation. We can therefore acknowledge that the repercussions of breaking a precept (as, for example, Nansen did, by killing a cat) might be very limited when set again the infinitude of the time and space of Buddha’s non attained practice. It is, moreover, possible to appreciate that Buddha Nature is unaffected by our errors, faults and shortcomings, whether arising from the best of intentions, or not. On the other hand, since we don’t live in the splendid isolation of an absolute unity, we do need to keep continually in mind the entangled network of real time conditions and circumstances, which we inhabit. Actions have consequences which may be far reaching and unpredictable. We live within the triple body of the Buddha. There is the formless, essential nature of reality, which is the Dharmakaya (the Absolute, or emptiness) and there is the phenomenal world in which we live with others, which is Nirmanakaya (our unique and discrete embodiment in real time conditions and circumstances). The realm of the precepts is at the interface between these two, which is the Sambhogakaya (the energetic body) and the desire world, which is where karma accumulates from our activities of body, mouth and thought. Senn in this context, I would say that, for all the clarity of understanding the great Zen master Nansen would have possessed, his inner mentor (Hrī) would have said he’d come up short when he killed the cat. In the outcome of his decision to kill the cat we might be witnessing an example of the importance of Apatrāpya. Nansen’s conscientious wish to awaken his monks brought upon him a sense of personal shame and social censure. He seems to have lamented the death of the cat, because he confessed what he’d done to his successor, Jōshū, who responded, understandingly, with a ritual of mourning. The perfection of the precepts works at the boundary between self and other, and relative and absolute. It’s motivated by a conscientious concern for the welfare of all and involves an unending quest for harmony and balance within life’s continually changing conditions and circumstances. It’s therefore the work of the moment, rather an investment of effort for a benefit to come. In that respect as Socrates might have said, it’s an example of virtue as its own reward. The first of the Perfections, or Pāramitās, is Dāna, which is translated as giving, generosity or liberality, although there are other more nuanced meanings, as we will see. Har Dayal says that originally, Dāna took its place beside Shīla (morality) as central planks of lay practice, which was traditionally seen as supportive of the monastic sangha, which depended on the laity for food and, during the rainy season, shelter. However, even in an early Mahayana teaching directed at lay practitioners in particular, the Ugrapariprcchā Sūtra argues that Dāna is a central tenet of anyone’s practice, without which the Pāramitās as a whole won’t unfold. At paragraph 11G of Jan Nattier’s translation, the Sutra says:
“When the householder bodhisattva sees a beggar, he will fulfil the cultivation of the six perfections (1) If asked for any object, he no longer grasps that object and Dāna is fulfilled (2) If he gives in the spirit of the Buddha Way Shīla if fulfilled (3) If he gives with kindness Ksānti (patience) is fulfilled (4) If he is not hesitant about loss Vīrya (energy or vigour), is fulfilled (5) If he gives without regret, and feels joy at doing so, Dhyāna (concentration or focus) is fulfilled (6) If he gives without thought of reward, Prajñā (wisdom) prajna is fulfilled In the Ugrapariprcchā Sūtra, Dāna as the traditional giving of goods, food and money to relieve poverty is extending into a more generalised generosity of spirit in which kindness, relinquishment and freedom from attachment or thought of reward lead into the cultivation of qualities of character such as fearlessness and wisdom, which may then themselves be given, in the sense of shared with, others. Robert Aitken Rōshi noticed that Dāna, as sharing, reflects interdependence as the inter support which enables practice. In Christianity, I think this would be understood as grace. We acknowledge our relationships of mutual inter support in the meal services chant on retreat, and we metabolise the giving of food into giving to others through our Zen practice. The world around us functions in just this way, as Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked in his essay, Nature: “The wind sows the seed, the sun evaporates the sea, the wind blows the vapour to the field… the rain feeds the plant, the plant feeds the animals.” Dāna, as pure giving without expectation of reward, is something quite natural. I am reminded of a story I heard told by a Unitarian minister about a boy in central Africa who wanted to give a Christmas present to his school teacher and, being from a very poor family that owned little, he decided to walk to the coast to find a beautiful shell to give to her. When he gave his shell to the teacher, she admired it for a while and then asked, “But where did you get it?” When the boy told her he’d walked to the coast and back, his teacher was astonished. “That must be several days walk there and back!” she exclaimed. “The walk is the gift,” the boy replied. Trevor Leggett told a similar story about a group of Chinese scholars who took a trip in a little boat down a river. As the boat drifted gently downstream in the current, the scholars noticed a man walking along the river bank. As the boat approached him, he took out a flute from his bag and played a serene tune to the scholars as they floated past. Then, he put away is flute and walked on. Bokushū Dōmyō (780-877), a Dharma brother of Rinzai Gigen (d. 867) could be fierce as a Zen teacher. However, he lived alone for a time in a hut where made straw sandals and would just leave them by the roadside for people to take. No one know where the sandals came from but they were much appreciated replacements for foot weary travellers, whose own sandals were worn out. When Bokushū was found out, he became known as “the sandals monk” for his great act of Dāna. These stories illustrate the value of intangible gifts and hint at the open-handed spirit that underlies the idea encapsulated by Dāna Pāramitā. Unfortunately, quite often, giving is seen as a transaction. If I do something for you, what will you do for me? For this reason, we can be very reluctant to accept a gift. We don’t was to feel indebted as a consequence of someone else’s generosity. In north American indigenous societies, giving was formalised into the Potlatch ceremony, in which important social events, such as treaties or marriages were solemnised by the giving of gifts. In East Asian society, gift giving is also culturally embedded and, as I understand it, refusing a gift would cause offence. On the other hand, there may still be something subliminally transactional going on. I think this is part of the underlying message of the encounter between the first Zen Ancestor Bodhidharma and the Emperor Wu of Liang. Buddhism motivates the laity to support the monastic sangha through the idea of merit. By giving to the monastic sangha lay Buddhists accumulate merit, which ameliorates their karma and sets up the conditions for a favourable rebirth in the next life. In the Middle Ages, Monarchs were also taught that, by supporting the sangha they would be promoting the general prosperity and stability of their kingdoms and the popularity and benevolence of their rule. The Emperor Wu was a devout Buddhist who paid for the establishment of many monasteries and the ordination of many monks and nuns. He asked Bodhidharma whether by doing this he’d accrued great merit. Bodhidharma, however, said not. There is no merit, in the sense of personal gain, from doing good; and the first and last meaning of the Buddha’s teaching is, “Vast emptiness; nothing holy!” Another we might say this is that, true generosity is its own reward. If we do something for others in the expectation of something in return or in order to make ourselves look good, our generosity is tainted. The Perfection of Giving is transactional. Nor is it the kind of sanctimonious, philanthropic obligation owed by the privileged, which, in nineteenth century Massachusetts, caused Henry David Thoreau to declare “There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, … for fear that I should get some of his good done to me…No, — in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way. A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one. I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. Philanthropy is not love for one’s fellow-man in the broadest sense… I never heard of a philanthropic meeting in which it was sincerely proposed to do any good to me, or the like of me.” Dāna Pāramitā is closer to an ordinary sense of easy-going good neighbourliness, which Thoreau did appreciate: I would not subtract anything from the praise that is due to philanthropy, but merely demand justice for all who by their lives and works are a blessing to mankind. I do not value chiefly a man’s uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick, serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks. I want the flower and fruit of a man; that some fragrance be wafted over from him to me, and some ripeness flavor our intercourse. His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious.” An unconscious superfluity of wealth stands in contrast with the sense we sometimes have that we need our material “stuff” in order to be confidently assured of our place in the world, which can make us feel very frightened of losing it, diminished when we can’t find it and personally violated when its stolen. However, it’s interesting and insightful to explore the question how far any of this is really true. I remember one occasion when I left a large bag on open view on the seat of a car that I parked in a municipal car park. Someone saw the bag, decided it was worth stealing and broke into my car. Apart from the bag itself, I lost my aikido keikogi and hakama (i.e., my rather sweat soiled training outfit), the black belt my chief instructor had awarded to me, my zafu (Zen cushion), a lay Zen robe and my rakusu (personal lay Zen emblem), which had been conferred on me several years earlier by my Zen teacher. Leaving aside the inconvenience of these losses, and my bemused irritation at their worthlessness to the thief, I was to begin with most bereft and upset by the loss of the blackbelt and the rakusu. Then, however, it dawned on me that I’d actually lost nothing at all. No one could take from me, and I could not lose or give away, the nature of the life which the blackbelt and the rakusu merely represented outwardly. Both could be replaced, and even if for some reason they could not, neither was intrinsically important. They referred to certain values, but they were not themselves the embodiment of the values to which they referred. I remember it being quite a liberation to realise this, and - strangely - I even felt grateful to the thief! I hope the bag was useful to him. The Japanese poet-mendicant, Ryokan, expressed the sentiment quite beautifully, after returning to his hut to find it burgled: subsequently discovered, The thief left it behind: the moon at my window. In the recorded sayings of the Chinese Zen Master, Hyakujō Ekai (720-824), a foremost successor of Baso Dōitsu (709-88), we can see very clearly how he thought about the importance of Dāna Pāramitā: One day Hyakujō was asked by a monk, “By what means can the gateway of our school be entered?” Hyakujō replied, “By means of the Dāna Pāramitā.” He explained that, “Dana means relinquishment…Relinquishment of the dualism of opposites… total relinquishment of ideas as to the dual nature of good and bad, being and non-being, love and aversion, void and non-void, concentration and distraction, pure and impure. By giving all of them up, we attain to a state in which all opposites are seen as empty. The real practice of the Dāna Pāramitā entails achieving this state without any thought of ‘Now I see that opposites are empty’ or ‘Now I have relinquished all of them’. We may also call it the simultaneous cutting off of the myriad types of concurrent causes [i.e., breaking free from habitual patterns of action and reaction in daily life] for it is when these are cut off that the whole Dharma-Nature becomes empty; and this emptiness of the Dharma-Nature means the non-dwelling of the mind upon anything whatsoever. Once that state is achieved, not a single form can be discerned. Why? Because our self-nature is immaterial and does not contain a single thing (foreign to itself). That which contains no single thing is true Reality, the marvellous form of the Tathāgata [i.e., the Buddha, the “Thus-Gone One”]. It is said in the Diamond Sūtra: ‘Those who relinquish all forms are called Buddhas (Enlightened Ones).’ ... you have only to understand that, by a single act of relinquishment, everything is relinquished … I exhort you students to practise the way of relinquishment and nothing else, for it brings to perfection not only the other five Pãramitās but also myriads of dharmas (methods). Sources: Ugrapariprcchā Sūtra: A few Good Me, The Bodhisattva Path according to the inquiry of Ugra, Jan Nattier (2005) Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson Walden; or a Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau Zen Teaching of Hui Hai; ON SUDDEN ILLUMINATION; Being the Teaching of the Zen Master Hui Hai, known as the Great Pearl Rendered into English by JOHN BLOFELD (Chu Ch'an)(1962) The translation of Ryokan’s poem is by Stephen Mitchell Zen is within the Mahayana, or so-called greater vehicle of Buddhism. The practice of the Mahayana is the practice of the Bodhisattva. A Bodhisattva is someone to seeks the perfection of Buddhahood by working for the welfare of all beings, rather than merely for his or her own sake. A Bodhisattva’s practice-career begins from a strong aspiration, called the bodhicitta, which is expressed by the four great vows, or pranidhāna, that we usually chant at the end of a class:
Sentient beings are numberless, I vow to save them; Desires are inexhaustible, I vow to put an end to them; The dharmas are boundless, I vow to mater them; The Buddha Way is unsurpassable, I vow to attain it. The enormity of these vows, their obvious impossibility of fulfilment, is part of their point. It is said that it would take an incalculable number of lifetimes to carry them through to completion, which is a way of saying that their merit lies in their performance, rather than any notion of any even partial accomplishment. They’re an expression of the Bodhisattva’s selfless commitment to practice, endlessly. Bodhisattva practice is presented in the six pāramitas, or perfections. They are dāna (giving), shīla (the precepts), ksānti (patience), vīrya (energy or vigour), dhyāna (concentration or focus) and prajñā (wisdom). These six may originally have derived from an earliest threefold formulation (triśikṣā): shīla, samādhi and prajñā, prefixed by the word adhi, meaning pre-eminent, which (according to Vasubandhu) denoted the accumulation of merit (punya) and transcendental understanding (jñāna). At some point, however, the six pāramitas were increased to ten, perhaps to match up with the ten stages (bhūmi) of the Bodhsattva career, or possibly merely because Indians, having discovered decimalisation, began rounding many things up to ten! At any rate, the four newer pāramitas are arguably supplementary to the original six. They are upāya (expedient means), pranidhāna (vows), bala (power) and jñāna (knowledge). The six or ten pāramitas offer us a prism of interrelated qualities through which we are able to cultivate and appreciate our Zen practice. Each of these qualities is worthy of reflection. Before beginning to do that, however, I want to say something about the word, pāramita. What is a pāramita? The Sanskrit word pāramita is normally translated by the English word “perfection.” In The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Sanskrit Literature (1932), Har Dayal examines the etymology of the word. He explains that its common meaning, in China and Tibet, presumes “pāram” to refer to the “other shore” and “ita” to mean “gone to” or “to have reached.” According to this understanding, the “other shore” conveys the idea of nirvana or liberation as distinct from samsara, or the world of endurance, in birth and death. It is suggestive of an escape from suffering into the Lotus paradise. However, the words “to have reached” would then convey the idea that, by the practice of the qualities enumerated in the pāramitas one attains liberation, whether one realises it or not, which would be consistent with the understanding that, if we do something whole heartedly, we’re really doing it without self-consciousness of our effort. The Daoist sage, Chung Tzu, captured the flavour of this understanding in his own context, when he said, “Perfection is like a dream … because one cannot apprehend the one who sees the dream.” Whole hearted engagement in an activity has the effect of transcending the dichotomy between means and ends and purifying purpose, so that practice becomes its own reward. This is one way in which the word pāramita can be understood. However, Har Dayal explains another, perhaps original meaning of paramita. Pārama, he says, suggests the “most distant, highest and most excellent”. On this understanding, a paramita is so-called because, taking an enormously long time to forge and refine, perfection is actually unattainable. We are only able to endlessly refine and hone our practice. On this understanding, perfection lies in the endless endeavour to practise. Both interpretations are captured in case nine of the Mumonkan kōan collection, in which a monk asks Master Seijō of Kōyō about a legendary Buddha, called Daitsū Chishō Buddha, who is said to have remained in zazen on his seat of awakening for inconceivably many eons without awakening. The monk asks why it is that Daitsū Chishō Buddha did not attain Buddhahood. Master Seijō responds approvingly, "Your question is splendid indeed". However, the monk does not follow, and persists, "He practiced zazen for eons. Why did he not attain Buddhahood?" Seijō replies, "Because he did not attain Buddhahood". We can understand the meaning of this kōan to be that, by practicing zazen, Buddhahood is performed, and there is nothing that Daitsū Chishō Buddha needs to attain. This would be the first meaning of paramita. Or, we can take Seijō’s meaning to be that because, subjectively speaking, Buddhahood cannot be attained, Daitsū Chishō Buddha could not attain Buddhahood, he could only practice it through endless eons. This would be the second meaning of pāramita. Master Rinzai Gigen assists further by explaining the significance of Daitsū Chishō Buddha’s name. He says that Daitsū, or “Great penetrating,” means seeing intimately into the no-nature of the ten thousand phenomena. Chishō, or “Victorious knowledge,” refers to being without doubt that nothing is to be attained. “Buddha” refers to the brightness of the mind. Daitsū Chishō Buddha’s endless eons of zazen practice refer to the enacted, lifeworld of the ten paramitas. Daitsū Chishō Buddha cannot attain Buddhahood because unlike attainment, in relation to which there must be non-attainment, Buddhahood is not subject to conditioned existence. How then, Rinzai asks, could it appear? How could be it be attained? Since Buddha does not need to do anything in order to be Buddha, in what way would a Buddha be unable to attain the Buddha Way? In just this way, we exemplify the qualities of the pāramitas. They are performative, allowing for no distinction between what we are and what we do. In other words, being is not passive. In being is always an active dimension. This is true even of zazen, which might be misunderstood as a passive engagement in pure being. It is dynamically performative. This is a point that Dōgen Zenji stresses in Shobogenzo Bendowa. He says that zazen is not merely the focussed, concentrated state suggested by words like samādhi and dhyana. Nor is it reducible to doctrinal formulae, such as the triśikṣā or the pāramitas. The intention of Buddha to transmit Buddha Dharma is, he says, revealed in his own life. In the same way, by our practice, we reveal the Buddha Dharma as our own lives. To practise zazen, or to practise the pāramitas, we practise our own lives. New Year Dharma Talk
In the translation by Taigen Dan Leighton and Shokaku Okamura of Dōgen Zenji’s Eihei Kōroku, there is a discourse given by Dōgen on New Year’s Day 1241 (number 32; vol.1). This is a transcription of the talk I gave on it online, on 4 January 2024. Dōgen began his discourse by saying that on the first day of the new year there are three blessings, because it is the beginning of the year, the beginning of the month, and the beginning of the day, He then illustrated these blessings with two stories from the dialogues of two T’ang Dynasty Zen Masters, Kyōsei Dōfu (867-937) and Meikyō Chimon Shika (for whom no dates survive). Both were successors in the lineage of Seppō Gison (822-908). In the first story, a monk asked Kyōsei, “Is there Buddha Dharma at the beginning of the new year or not?” Kyōsei replied, “There is.” The monk then asked, “What is the Buddha Dharma at the beginning of the new year?” As Dōgen agreed, in the introduction to his discourse, he reports Kyosei to have responded, “New Year’s Day begins with a blessing and the ten thousand things are completely new.” When the monk said, “Thank you, teacher, for your answer,” Kyōsei concluded, “This old monk today lost the advantage” (which apparently implied that the monk bettered Kyōsei’s own expression of the Dharma). It seems from this first story that to say, “thank you for your answer” is a better expression of Buddha Dharma at the beginning of the new year than to say, “New Year’s Day begins with a blessing and the ten thousand things are completely new.” We can ask why that might be. Perhaps, Kyōsei felt that his own words were less of an authentic expression of the opportunity for Zen practice at the beginning of the new year than were the monk’s simple words of gratitude, which represent an important quality of continual significance, rather than something of poignance only at the new year. At any rate, it's striking that another successor of Seppō, the Zen master Ummon Bun’en (864-949), famously said something that brings out the everyday significance of the Buddha Dharma: "I don't ask you about before the fifteenth day; try to make a statement about after the fifteenth day." Ummon himself replied, "Every day is a good day." Ummon might have asked whether, if New Year’s Day begins with a blessing, so that the ten thousand things are completely new, is that not also true every day, and indeed at every moment? Does not the sun rise anew every morning, and is there not in each moment an unobstructed opportunity to wake up? The passing of the year is nevertheless a punctuation mark in the way we think about our lives. As we clasp hands, and sign Aulde Lang Syne together, the midnight hour is a moment when we might feel some nostalgia or relief about what’s passed; and very often we also feel a sense of renewed commitment towards, or optimism about, the year ahead. However, when we stop to reflect more deeply, isn’t it rather arbitrary to look at the New Year in the way we commonly do? Does not the same potentiality for nostalgia or renewal exist in every moment of our lives? As Ummon said, every day a good day. Every moment is one of great blessing, for which we can show appreciation and gratitude. So, Kyōsei might have thought that the monk’s simple expression of general thanks was indeed closer to the Buddha Dharma than his own affirmation of the specific blessing of the new year. The second story Dōgen related in his discourse concerned another monk who appeared before Meikyō and asked the identical question: "Is there Buddha Dharma at the beginning of the new year, or not?" Meikyō however replied, "There is not." I wonder whether this monk knew Ummon’s saying that every day is a good day when he retorted, "Every year is a good year, every day is a good day; why isn't there Buddha Dharma in the beginning of the new year?" To quote the eminent Ummon in this way would have been a test of Meikyō’s understanding. In reply, he said, "Old man Zhang drinks, and old man Li gets drunk." When the monk then said, "Great Elder, you are like a dragon's head and snake's tail," Meikyō, like Kyōsei, concluded, "This old monk today lost the advantage." Like the words, “every day is a good day,” Taigen Dan Leighton suggests that the simile of “a dragon's head and snake's tail” originated with Ummon Bun’en, too. If that’s correct then the second monk resorted twice to the authority of Ummon. First, he asserted that every day is a good day, and then he used the simile of the darogn’s head and snake’s tail to criticise Meikyō. In this instance, the simile would have been intended to infer that, although Meikyō started well (denying the special significance of New Year’s Day), he ended poorly, by coming out with an ancient aphorism, which apparently denies causality (“Old man Zhang drinks, and old man Li gets drunk”). Since Meikyō allowed that, "This old monk today lost the advantage," he might be understood to have agreed that, like Kyōsei, he hadn’t expressed the Buddha Dharma as well as his questioner. In both cases, however, Dōgen invites us to consider whether that’s really what happened, however. Before we get to that, though, we ought to consider what Meikyō might have meant, when he said “Old man Zhang drinks, and old man Li gets drunk.” If the monk believed the axiom that, “Every day is a good day,” then, in one sense, of course, he was right – It’s a basic Mahayana Buddhist teaching that, in every moment, the Buddha Dharma is fully available as the unobstructed opportunity to awaken to the wisdom and compassion of the Buddhas and Ancestors. However, Meikyō may have been be cautioning some care about how that teaching is understood. If, for example, we were to answer every situation we encounter, no matter what, with a trite response that, “Every day is a good day,” it might not be too long before we became somewhat callous about the consequences, or else passive in the face of obvious injustice. A later Japanese teacher, Tenkei Denson (1648–1735), warned that clinging to such a detached perspective we wind up in the “stagnant water of transcendence”. We should not be too quick in our acceptance of any understanding, expecially an understanding of “acceptance”, which is encapsulated within the key teaching of ksānti-paramita, the perfection of patience. As the Buddhist scholar and translator, Herbert Guenther, pointed out, “… acceptance, though giving us a [trans-personal] point of view from which to look out into reality, at the same time has a fossilising effect” (Philosophy and Psychology of the Abhidharma; page 240). It can leave us with a rather self-assured, inflexible and inhumane point of view. Moreover, when we believe we have all the answers we’re no longer humble or curious and we believe that life no longer holds any surprises for us. Thinking in this way, we can deceive ourselves into believing that life is reliably predictable and controllable, and it will therefore come as a great shock to us when we discover that neither is the case. I think that this kind of self-deception may be what Meikyō was warning the monk against, when he said “Old man Zhang drinks, and old man Li gets drunk. He wasn’t denying causality, in the sense that there are dependencies and connections between what’s gone before, what’s happening now and what’s about to arise. Rather, he was suggesting both that there is a way to break free from the past and its ramifications in the present moment, and that the consequences of past conditions are not always easily discerned, however undeniable they may turn out to be. Life, in other words, is full of surprises. It doesn’t follow that things will always turn out today as they did before, nor does it follow that what happened before will happen again. If we see our lives merely in terms of mechanical cause-and-effect, we isolate factors and treat conditions reductively, missing the interconnected and holistic totality of the situation. To pick out and highlight the salience of particular causes and effects, we have to isolate them from the subtlety of the countless entanglements that make up the conditions and circumstances of our lives. Although it may be true, when we look down on life in a detached way, that every day is a good day, the question will remain whether we are truly ready for all the “goodness” that each day brings forth. How will we make sense of the situation when “Old man Zhang drinks, and old man Li gets drunk”? Will we find that, after all, we are like a dragon's head and snake's tail? Asked the same question, “Is there Buddha Dharma at the beginning of the new year or not?” Kyōsei said that there is; and Meikyō said, there is not. In his own commentary of these two stories, Daido Loori Rōshi (1931-2009) said that we cannot reconcile Kyōsei’s and Meikyō’s if we examine only their words. We have to be free to see what they’re getting at. We face the same difficulty in trying to understand the two opposing dialogues of Master Jōshū on the Buddha Nature of a dog (see my earlier blog). We have to look beyond the words employed and inquire into the life that is apart from affirmation and denial and apart from gaining and losing advantage. Kyōsei and Meikyō were free to give opposing answers and at the same time agree that, “This old monk today lost the advantage.” Having told the stories of Kyōsei and Meikyō, Dogen Zenji concluded his own discourse with his interpretation of their words. He said that, asked himself whether there is Buddha Dharma at the beginning of the new year or not, he would reply that there is. Asked, “What is the Buddha Dharma at the beginning of the new year?” he said that he would say, “May each and every body, whether staying still or standing up, have ten thousand blessings.” If the monk then responded, "In that case, in accordance with this saying, I will practice," Dōgen would say, “Today, I have advantage after advantage.” His final remark was, “Now please practise.” I notice that, unlike Kyōsei, Dōgen did not say, “New Year’s Day begins with a blessing.” Instead, he said, “May each and every body… have ten thousand blessings.” It strikes me that there’s no passive entitlement to a good day in these words. Instead, I think Dōgen meant that Kyōsei’s “ten thousand blessings” arise from engagement in practice with Kyōsei’s “ten thousand things [that] are completely new”. They’re new if we appreciate them as new (or, in other words, life is renewed if we throw ourselves into it with wholehearted commitment over and again). This, I would say, is the meaning of the words, "In that case, in accordance with this saying, I will practice" and “Today, I have advantage after advantage.” It is when we throw ourselves wholeheartedly into the practice of this moment that every day is a good day and there is the advantage of no before or after, and no loss or gain. When there is no gain or loss, there is the freedom to say we have lost the advantage. When a year ends, and another begins, what is the nature of the dividing line between the two? Do we see our lives as a dragon's head and a snake's tail? Are the two sides of midnight, or indeed any moment, opposing and different? Moving from one year to the next, is there gain or loss? Dōgen answers, “Now, please practise.” Let’s all thank him for his answer.  Koan:
A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature or not?” Jōshū answered, “Mu!” Joshu’s Mu is the first of 48 cases or kōan appearing in the Gateless Gate kōan collection (the Mumonkan) complied by Mumon Ekai (1183-1260), in 1228. It’s also the first case in the 200 introductory kōan studied by students working with teachers in Taizan Maezumi Roshi’s White Plum lineage; and it appears in the Rinzai Zen Shumon Kattoshu (Vines and Entanglements) and in the Sōtõ Zen Shoyoroku (Book of Equanimity). In the White Plum curriculum this kōan is studied three times. So, it’s a first and fundamental case for study, to which we keep coming back. Mumo considered this kōan the barrier of the ancestors, perhaps because we entrap ourselves by its seeming obscurity. We overthink its meaning and look for its resolution in the wrong place. Since Mu cannot be thought out and explained away, its resolution demands a leap beyond personal, dualistic perspective, even as we begin by grasping at shadows in a search for some grammatical means to articulate its unconditioned significance. The resolution of this kōan comes from a profound change in our appreciation of our own being in relation to the teaching of Buddha Nature. Mumon Ekai said of this kōan: “To realize Zen, one has to pass through the barrier of the ancestors. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, or if your path of discursive reasoning is not blocked off, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like an entangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a ancestors? It’s just this, “Mu!” This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it, you will see Jōshū face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of ancestors. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” The kōan’s significance arises from the question Joshu was asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature, or not?” The monk asks the question because, in the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra, the Buddha teaches that all beings have the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature, which is nevertheless indistinguishable from conditioned existence and the monk wanted to understand what Buddha Nature was. The question was not an idle speculation. Seeing a dog in the temple courtyard perhaps, the monk intently wondered something along these lines: “If, as the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra says, all beings have the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature, then I must have it; and that dog in the courtyard must have it. So, what is it? Why can’t I find it? Do I really have it, or not? Does that dog have it?” The teaching that all beings have the Buddha Nature had considerable traction in the development of Buddhism in east Asia and many of the principal sects of Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen, were fundamentally shaped by it. The thrust of the teaching is that Buddha Nature or Enlightenment is not something we acquire from practice, it is our original nature. We have always been fully endowed with Buddha Nature from the beginning of everything. It is one thing, however, to read and understand the words of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra, and perhaps also to have a certain amount of faith that the Buddha Nature teaching must be true; and quite another to experience the teaching as true for oneself, as one’s own life. The central concern of Buddhism is not merely that we believe the teachings but that we test them out, practice them and find them to be true for ourselves. It’s imaginable then, that during the heyday of Buddhism in China countless Buddhists devotedly learned, copied out, studied and chanted the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra with the intention to see directly for themselves that all beings have the Buddha Nature, and that many of these people, try as they might, could not get a handle on what Buddha Nature was. Chapter 27 the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra suggested an approach to understanding Buddha Nature offered a clue to the realisation of Buddha Nature: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. There must have been many earnest Buddhist practitioners who studied this verse and prayed ardently that their time would come, and Buddha Nature would be made manifest before them. It’s exceptional however that persistent and ardent desire alone delivers to us what we want. More commonly we need help and guidance in our endeavours and we need the right tool to break down the obstacles to obtaining what we want. The monk who asked Joshu whether a dog had Buddha Nature or not might have watched the dog intently, as it carried on in real time conditions and circumstances, and wondered when the time would come for it Buddha Nature to be manifest before him As Zen became established in China, it offered the person-to-person transmission of a direct, intimate understanding of the meaning of the Buddha’s teachings, without reliance on the words of sutra study. To many renowned exegetes of the sutras, the Zen teachers making such claims would have seemed like fraudsters, however, there were many monks and nuns who turned to Zen from a desperate need for the personal experience of Buddha Nature they lacked from the study of the mere words of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra. The monk questioning Joshu would have been like this. However, when the monk put his question to Master Joshu, he received the answer “Mu!” We may wonder how that helped him. The point however of the kōan is that is if we penetrate the meaning of Mu we ourselves will be helped, immeasurably. There are two recorded versions of the dialogue about the dog and Buddha Nature in the record of Master Joshu, although it’s only the first one, in which he answered “Mu!” (“No!”), which was incorporated by later teachers into the classical kōan collections. The full record of Master Joshu reads like this: A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Joshu answered, “Mu! [no]” The monk replied, “All sentient beings have Buddha nature. Why would a dog not have it?” Joshu said, “Because it has karmic consciousness.” A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Joshu answered, “Yu! [yes]” The monk replied, “If it has, why then is it still stuffed into a bag of skin?” Joshu said, ”Because though it knows, it deliberately transgresses.” It does not particularly matter whether it was the same monk or two different monks who asked these two questions. What’s interesting is that on the first occasion Joshu answered in the negative; and on the second, in the affirmative. His first answer denied that the conditioned existence of a dog could be anything apart from its dog nature. If the monk thought its Buddha Nature would be something other than its karmic consciousness, or dog nature, he didn’t understand what Buddha Nature was. Joshu invited the monk to see the dog as a dog, rather than try to make it conform to some invocation of an idealised Buddha Nature. In the second case, Joshu affirmed that even in its conditioned existence as a dog, the dog was nevertheless nothing other than Buddha Nature; because, in the dog’s case, Buddha Nature was nothing other than the bag of skin making up the dog’s conditioned existence, as a dog. In both answers, the issue at stake was not the affirmative or the negative answer, it was the monks’ misidentifications of the Buddha Nature as other than conditioned existence. It’s unimportant whether Joshu said, “No!” rather than “Yes!” or “Yes!” rather “No!” in as much as neither answer denied the phenomenal nature of the dog as a dog; and both answers threw the monk the bare bone of the dog’s facticity, as an invitation to see what the Buddha Nature of a dog therefore amounted to. Joshu’s intention was, of course, that the monk should see for himself what his own Buddha Nature amounted to. This is also precisely the point encapsulated in the verse: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. The kōan of the nonsensical answer “Mu!” throws us up against the boundaries of real time, conditions and circumstances in order to that we might appreciate what we amounts to. For the purposes of kōan study, we could say that the words of the sūtra “We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances” match up with the advice of Master Mumon Ekai, “Just concentrate your whole energy into Mu!, and do not allow any discontinuation.” Master Mumon Ekai also said that to pass through the barrier of the kōan Mu, realise Buddha Nature and see Joshu face to face, it’s necessary to study, “…through every bone in your body, through every pore of your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night.” If we are willing to muster the determination to do as Master Mumon Ekai advises then the real time, conditions and circumstances of our lives become transparent and Mu appears. It is not nothingness, and nor is it merely the real time, conditions and circumstances as we ordinarily think of them. From study of Mu the realisation of Buddha Nature dawns, and a treasure store of abundance, which is the birth right of us all is found to be spread out, all around. In the meantime, Master Mumon Ekai advised that the question “What is Mu?” should be pursued unremittingly, as if, “…you had taken into your mouth, “a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.” Imagine the visceral discomfort conjured up by this image! Mumon Ekai urges the abandonment of all swallowing and spitting out, which is to say all preconceived ideas and beliefs about Mu, or Buddha Nature. The resolution of the kōan is not to be found in evasive and mediated interpretations of its meaning. All our usual stratagems and explanations for containing doubt must all be thrown out, and the dark significance of Mu itself must be fearlessly embraced. Master Dōgen expressed the same perspective when he said that where the sutra says, Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, it includes wanting to forget. So saying, Dōgen was hinting at a heuristically embodied understanding of the nature of existence, in which knowledge harvested from books and scholarly research is laid to one side. In the study of Mu, “wanting to forget” is to put aside everything we think we know about Buddha Nature, or the kōan itself, together with everything we think might be a potential answer to the kōan. We need to throw ourselves into an investigation of Mu with an expansive and open-minded doubt. The sūtra’s admonition that We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances csan be considered together with Joshu’s two answers to the same question, both of refer to the real time, conditions and circumstances of a dog being a dog. Master Dōgen said that that the wanting to know exhibited in both questions is not different from real time, conditions and circumstances, which in terms of the koan is equivalent to saying that the question, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature of not?” is not different from real time, conditions and circumstances, and indeed that everything in the kōan is not different from, real time, conditions and circumstances. The monk, Joshu, the dog, Buddha Nature, the question, the answer Mu, or any other answer, are none other than real time, conditions and circumstances. Such an understanding follows because the expression, real time, conditions and circumstances, refers to the conditioned nature of all existence: i.e., as insubstantial, contingent and impermanent. There is no stepping outside of this law, which is all we find when we look for the cause, essence or ground of phenomenal existence. One of the Buddha’s most accomplished contemporary followers, the venerable Saripūtra, is recorded to have said that whomsoever understands the teaching of real time, conditions and circumstances realises the essence of Buddhism, and whomsoever understands the essence of the Buddhism realises this teaching. It’s therefore perfectly consistent that Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. and so too Joshu’s utterance Mu and its helpfulness as a barrier koan. There is however something rather important, and perhaps startling, that we need to register about the identification of “wanting to know” with “real time, conditions and circumstances. Look again at these lines: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. Buddha Nature and real time conditions and circumstances are identical. Buddha Nature and Mu are identical. Mu and the dog are identical. If, we understand Buddhism to mean that the practice of the Way will lead us away from dukkha (suffering) and samudaya (its cause) to a new and different place, nibbana (release from suffering) via marga (the eightfold path), then we overlook the identify of Buddha Nature and real time conditions and circumstances, and Dogen cautioned that the effect would actually be to perpetuate our suffering and bring about its continued cultivation! Suffering and its cause arise within real time, conditions and circumstances. Release from suffering and a path to the release from suffering also arise within real time, conditions and circumstances. It isn’t possible to escape real time conditions and circumstances by means of real time conditions and circumstances. We always remain in the feedback loop of real time conditions and circumstances. We need to remember this, as we grapple after the resolution of the kōan, and begin to chase the shadows of all sorts of metaphysical ideas about what Mu might be. What then is the solution? How do we penetrate the barrier of Mu and see the Buddha Nature? Dogen said the words, we should just reflect, in the line, We should just reflect real time, causes and circumstances make it clear that the real time, conditions and circumstances of everyday life, with all its highs and lows, can nevertheless provide us with a complete understanding of the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature. Why was he able to say that? Real time, conditions and circumstances offer a complete understanding of the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature if we work with our lives in an embodied and enacted way, rather than by imagining Buddha Nature as an intellectual construct. To just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances is to allow the whole of our sensory apparatus to engage with the whole of life as-it-is, effortlessly and transparently. Engaging with life in this way then, as the sutra says, the time has come, and Buddha Nature is manifest before us. To put it differently, and in terms of the kōan, we penetrate the barrier of Mu when we embody it, rather than merely think about it. A mirror might be a good analogy for an embodied and enactive understanding of Mu (in the sense that Dōgen suggests to be the meaning of just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances). However, an important difference between a human being and a mirror is that a mirror isn’t busy. A mirror mindlessly and passively reflects. Human beings, by contrast, are always busy, hurrying from one thing to the next. So, in a way, we’re like distorted mirrors. We don’t reflect the arising, duration and departure of things all that clearly, because we’re relentlessly impelled either to hang on to, or move on from, real time, conditions and circumstances. Remembering the last thing and anticipating the next, we’re seldom passive; and we’re not so good at remaining more than fleetingly attentive to the present moment. In this way, we tend to overlook much of what’s presented to our senses and we don’t often take the trouble to examine what real time, conditions and circumstances say about the nature of momentary experience, as it arises. Instead, we dwell on what is already in the past, or our expectations about the future. In this way, we miss the subtle revelation behind the words, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances, which Master Tōzan Ryōkai (807–869) described, in these lines from his Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, Like facing a precious mirror; form and reflection behold each other. You are not it, but in truth it is you. This is the transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances direct us, and the intimate experience of the kōan of Joshu’s Mu. Wanting to know Mu, Mumon Ekai urges us to earnestly raise the doubt, “What is Mu?” during housework, walking to the bus and other day to day real time, conditions and circumstances. Doing so, we just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances, which is to say we unselfconsciously move beyond the dualistic subject - object paradigm that infects and distorts our understanding of the distinction between delusion and enlightenment. To just reflect, or to be lost in the question, “What is Mu?” is a transparent interaction with real time, conditions and circumstances. To put it differently, to lose ourselves in the doubt about the nature of Mu, is a transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances. In the transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances, is the moment of When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. Dōgen Zenji said that, When the time is come means this time. To raise the doubt about Mu is the catalyst that enables to us ascertain the significance of reflecting real time, conditions and circumstances as the Buddha Nature of our own lives. When the time has come, in the present moment, the reality of The Buddha Nature is immediately manifest before us, appears, like a clear reflection in the mirror. When the barrier of Mu is pierced, it is seen in its entirety, and there is no doubt what Mu is. Dōgen said: “There has never been any time which was not time having come nor any Buddha Nature which was not the Buddha Nature manifesting before us.” There is therefore nothing in real time, conditions and circumstances from which we should feel any need for retreat or disengagement, or indeed any aspect of real time, conditions and circumstances from which retreat or disengagement is actually possible. Nothing impedes us from appreciating that in the present moment of real time, conditions and circumstances the lived-experience of Buddha Nature is manifesting. There was nothing to impede the monk’s sight when he questioned Joshu about the Buddha Nature of a dog and there is nothing impeding us from penetrating the barrier of Mu. If the kōan blocks us, and generally it does, it’s because we hide from ourselves in an inattentive reluctance to reflect real time conditions and circumstances, as they are. Note There are a few published translations of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra available in book format and online. For consistency and ease of reading I have adapted the verses I have used to align with the terminology in other translated materials I have used. I have referred to the Nishijima and Cross translation of Eihei Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo (and in particular the Busshō fascicle). The quotation from the Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi is from the translation by Taigen Dan Leighton, published in Cultivating the Empty Field. The edition of the Mumonkan I referred to is The Gateless Barrier, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, by Zenkei Shiayama Roshi. The two dialogues about the Buddha Nature of a dog can be found in The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, by James Green. The Calligraphic kanji, Mu, is by Brigitte D'Ortschy (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported) |
Koan: A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature or not?” Jōshū answered, “Mu!” Joshu’s Mu is the first of 48 cases or kōan appearing in the Gateless Gate kōan collection (the Mumonkan) complied by Mumon Ekai (1183-1260), in 1228. It’s also the first case in the 200 introductory kōan studied by students working with teachers in Taizan Maezumi Roshi’s White Plum lineage; and it appears in the Rinzai Zen Shumon Kattoshu (Vines and Entanglements) and in the Sōtõ Zen Shoyoroku (Book of Equanimity). In the White Plum curriculum this kōan is studied three times. So, it’s a first and fundamental case for study, to which we keep coming back. Mumo considered this kōan the barrier of the ancestors, perhaps because we entrap ourselves by its seeming obscurity. We overthink its meaning and look for its resolution in the wrong place. Since Mu cannot be thought out and explained away, its resolution demands a leap beyond personal, dualistic perspective, even as we begin by grasping at shadows in a search for some grammatical means to articulate its unconditioned significance. The resolution of this kōan comes from a profound change in our appreciation of our own being in relation to the teaching of Buddha Nature. Mumon Ekai said of this kōan: “To realize Zen, one has to pass through the barrier of the ancestors. Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked. If you do not pass the barrier of the ancestors, or if your path of discursive reasoning is not blocked off, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like an entangling ghost. You may ask: What is a barrier of a ancestors? It’s just this, “Mu!” This is the barrier of Zen. If you pass through it, you will see Jōshū face to face. Then you can work hand in hand with the whole line of ancestors. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” The kōan’s significance arises from the question Joshu was asked, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature, or not?” The monk asks the question because, in the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra, the Buddha teaches that all beings have the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature, which is nevertheless indistinguishable from conditioned existence and the monk wanted to understand what Buddha Nature was. The question was not an idle speculation. Seeing a dog in the temple courtyard perhaps, the monk intently wondered something along these lines: “If, as the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra says, all beings have the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature, then I must have it; and that dog in the courtyard must have it. So, what is it? Why can’t I find it? Do I really have it, or not? Does that dog have it?” The teaching that all beings have the Buddha Nature had considerable traction in the development of Buddhism in east Asia and many of the principal sects of Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen, were fundamentally shaped by it. The thrust of the teaching is that Buddha Nature or Enlightenment is not something we acquire from practice, it is our original nature. We have always been fully endowed with Buddha Nature from the beginning of everything. It is one thing, however, to read and understand the words of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra, and perhaps also to have a certain amount of faith that the Buddha Nature teaching must be true; and quite another to experience the teaching as true for oneself, as one’s own life. The central concern of Buddhism is not merely that we believe the teachings but that we test them out, practice them and find them to be true for ourselves. It’s imaginable then, that during the heyday of Buddhism in China countless Buddhists devotedly learned, copied out, studied and chanted the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra with the intention to see directly for themselves that all beings have the Buddha Nature, and that many of these people, try as they might, could not get a handle on what Buddha Nature was. Chapter 27 the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra suggested an approach to understanding Buddha Nature offered a clue to the realisation of Buddha Nature: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. There must have been many earnest Buddhist practitioners who studied this verse and prayed ardently that their time would come, and Buddha Nature would be made manifest before them. It’s exceptional however that persistent and ardent desire alone delivers to us what we want. More commonly we need help and guidance in our endeavours and we need the right tool to break down the obstacles to obtaining what we want. The monk who asked Joshu whether a dog had Buddha Nature or not might have watched the dog intently, as it carried on in real time conditions and circumstances, and wondered when the time would come for it Buddha Nature to be manifest before him As Zen became established in China, it offered the person-to-person transmission of a direct, intimate understanding of the meaning of the Buddha’s teachings, without reliance on the words of sutra study. To many renowned exegetes of the sutras, the Zen teachers making such claims would have seemed like fraudsters, however, there were many monks and nuns who turned to Zen from a desperate need for the personal experience of Buddha Nature they lacked from the study of the mere words of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra. The monk questioning Joshu would have been like this. However, when the monk put his question to Master Joshu, he received the answer “Mu!” We may wonder how that helped him. The point however of the kōan is that is if we penetrate the meaning of Mu we ourselves will be helped, immeasurably. There are two recorded versions of the dialogue about the dog and Buddha Nature in the record of Master Joshu, although it’s only the first one, in which he answered “Mu!” (“No!”), which was incorporated by later teachers into the classical kōan collections. The full record of Master Joshu reads like this: A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Joshu answered, “Mu! [no]” The monk replied, “All sentient beings have Buddha nature. Why would a dog not have it?” Joshu said, “Because it has karmic consciousness.” A monk asked, “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” Joshu answered, “Yu! [yes]” The monk replied, “If it has, why then is it still stuffed into a bag of skin?” Joshu said, ”Because though it knows, it deliberately transgresses.” It does not particularly matter whether it was the same monk or two different monks who asked these two questions. What’s interesting is that on the first occasion Joshu answered in the negative; and on the second, in the affirmative. His first answer denied that the conditioned existence of a dog could be anything apart from its dog nature. If the monk thought its Buddha Nature would be something other than its karmic consciousness, or dog nature, he didn’t understand what Buddha Nature was. Joshu invited the monk to see the dog as a dog, rather than try to make it conform to some invocation of an idealised Buddha Nature. In the second case, Joshu affirmed that even in its conditioned existence as a dog, the dog was nevertheless nothing other than Buddha Nature; because, in the dog’s case, Buddha Nature was nothing other than the bag of skin making up the dog’s conditioned existence, as a dog. In both answers, the issue at stake was not the affirmative or the negative answer, it was the monks’ misidentifications of the Buddha Nature as other than conditioned existence. It’s unimportant whether Joshu said, “No!” rather than “Yes!” or “Yes!” rather “No!” in as much as neither answer denied the phenomenal nature of the dog as a dog; and both answers threw the monk the bare bone of the dog’s facticity, as an invitation to see what the Buddha Nature of a dog therefore amounted to. Joshu’s intention was, of course, that the monk should see for himself what his own Buddha Nature amounted to. This is also precisely the point encapsulated in the verse: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. The kōan of the nonsensical answer “Mu!” throws us up against the boundaries of real time, conditions and circumstances in order to that we might appreciate what we amounts to. For the purposes of kōan study, we could say that the words of the sūtra “We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances” match up with the advice of Master Mumon Ekai, “Just concentrate your whole energy into Mu!, and do not allow any discontinuation.” Master Mumon Ekai also said that to pass through the barrier of the kōan Mu, realise Buddha Nature and see Joshu face to face, it’s necessary to study, “…through every bone in your body, through every pore of your skin, filled with this question: What is Mu? and carry it day and night.” If we are willing to muster the determination to do as Master Mumon Ekai advises then the real time, conditions and circumstances of our lives become transparent and Mu appears. It is not nothingness, and nor is it merely the real time, conditions and circumstances as we ordinarily think of them. From study of Mu the realisation of Buddha Nature dawns, and a treasure store of abundance, which is the birth right of us all is found to be spread out, all around. In the meantime, Master Mumon Ekai advised that the question “What is Mu?” should be pursued unremittingly, as if, “…you had taken into your mouth, “a hot iron ball that you can neither swallow nor spit out.” Imagine the visceral discomfort conjured up by this image! Mumon Ekai urges the abandonment of all swallowing and spitting out, which is to say all preconceived ideas and beliefs about Mu, or Buddha Nature. The resolution of the kōan is not to be found in evasive and mediated interpretations of its meaning. All our usual stratagems and explanations for containing doubt must all be thrown out, and the dark significance of Mu itself must be fearlessly embraced. Master Dōgen expressed the same perspective when he said that where the sutra says, Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, it includes wanting to forget. So saying, Dōgen was hinting at a heuristically embodied understanding of the nature of existence, in which knowledge harvested from books and scholarly research is laid to one side. In the study of Mu, “wanting to forget” is to put aside everything we think we know about Buddha Nature, or the kōan itself, together with everything we think might be a potential answer to the kōan. We need to throw ourselves into an investigation of Mu with an expansive and open-minded doubt. The sūtra’s admonition that We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances csan be considered together with Joshu’s two answers to the same question, both of refer to the real time, conditions and circumstances of a dog being a dog. Master Dōgen said that that the wanting to know exhibited in both questions is not different from real time, conditions and circumstances, which in terms of the koan is equivalent to saying that the question, “Does a dog have Buddha Nature of not?” is not different from real time, conditions and circumstances, and indeed that everything in the kōan is not different from, real time, conditions and circumstances. The monk, Joshu, the dog, Buddha Nature, the question, the answer Mu, or any other answer, are none other than real time, conditions and circumstances. Such an understanding follows because the expression, real time, conditions and circumstances, refers to the conditioned nature of all existence: i.e., as insubstantial, contingent and impermanent. There is no stepping outside of this law, which is all we find when we look for the cause, essence or ground of phenomenal existence. One of the Buddha’s most accomplished contemporary followers, the venerable Saripūtra, is recorded to have said that whomsoever understands the teaching of real time, conditions and circumstances realises the essence of Buddhism, and whomsoever understands the essence of the Buddhism realises this teaching. It’s therefore perfectly consistent that Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. and so too Joshu’s utterance Mu and its helpfulness as a barrier koan. There is however something rather important, and perhaps startling, that we need to register about the identification of “wanting to know” with “real time, conditions and circumstances. Look again at these lines: Wanting to know the meaning of the Buddha Nature, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances. Buddha Nature and real time conditions and circumstances are identical. Buddha Nature and Mu are identical. Mu and the dog are identical. If, we understand Buddhism to mean that the practice of the Way will lead us away from dukkha (suffering) and samudaya (its cause) to a new and different place, nibbana (release from suffering) via marga (the eightfold path), then we overlook the identify of Buddha Nature and real time conditions and circumstances, and Dogen cautioned that the effect would actually be to perpetuate our suffering and bring about its continued cultivation! Suffering and its cause arise within real time, conditions and circumstances. Release from suffering and a path to the release from suffering also arise within real time, conditions and circumstances. It isn’t possible to escape real time conditions and circumstances by means of real time conditions and circumstances. We always remain in the feedback loop of real time conditions and circumstances. We need to remember this, as we grapple after the resolution of the kōan, and begin to chase the shadows of all sorts of metaphysical ideas about what Mu might be. What then is the solution? How do we penetrate the barrier of Mu and see the Buddha Nature? Dogen said the words, we should just reflect, in the line, We should just reflect real time, causes and circumstances make it clear that the real time, conditions and circumstances of everyday life, with all its highs and lows, can nevertheless provide us with a complete understanding of the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature. Why was he able to say that? Real time, conditions and circumstances offer a complete understanding of the ineffably subtle, eternal, blissful, authentic and pure Buddha Nature if we work with our lives in an embodied and enacted way, rather than by imagining Buddha Nature as an intellectual construct. To just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances is to allow the whole of our sensory apparatus to engage with the whole of life as-it-is, effortlessly and transparently. Engaging with life in this way then, as the sutra says, the time has come, and Buddha Nature is manifest before us. To put it differently, and in terms of the kōan, we penetrate the barrier of Mu when we embody it, rather than merely think about it. A mirror might be a good analogy for an embodied and enactive understanding of Mu (in the sense that Dōgen suggests to be the meaning of just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances). However, an important difference between a human being and a mirror is that a mirror isn’t busy. A mirror mindlessly and passively reflects. Human beings, by contrast, are always busy, hurrying from one thing to the next. So, in a way, we’re like distorted mirrors. We don’t reflect the arising, duration and departure of things all that clearly, because we’re relentlessly impelled either to hang on to, or move on from, real time, conditions and circumstances. Remembering the last thing and anticipating the next, we’re seldom passive; and we’re not so good at remaining more than fleetingly attentive to the present moment. In this way, we tend to overlook much of what’s presented to our senses and we don’t often take the trouble to examine what real time, conditions and circumstances say about the nature of momentary experience, as it arises. Instead, we dwell on what is already in the past, or our expectations about the future. In this way, we miss the subtle revelation behind the words, We should just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances, which Master Tōzan Ryōkai (807–869) described, in these lines from his Song of the Jewel Mirror Samadhi, Like facing a precious mirror; form and reflection behold each other. You are not it, but in truth it is you. This is the transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances direct us, and the intimate experience of the kōan of Joshu’s Mu. Wanting to know Mu, Mumon Ekai urges us to earnestly raise the doubt, “What is Mu?” during housework, walking to the bus and other day to day real time, conditions and circumstances. Doing so, we just reflect real time, conditions and circumstances, which is to say we unselfconsciously move beyond the dualistic subject - object paradigm that infects and distorts our understanding of the distinction between delusion and enlightenment. To just reflect, or to be lost in the question, “What is Mu?” is a transparent interaction with real time, conditions and circumstances. To put it differently, to lose ourselves in the doubt about the nature of Mu, is a transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances. In the transcendence of real time, conditions and circumstances, is the moment of When the time has come, The Buddha Nature is manifest before us. Dōgen Zenji said that, When the time is come means this time. To raise the doubt about Mu is the catalyst that enables to us ascertain the significance of reflecting real time, conditions and circumstances as the Buddha Nature of our own lives. When the time has come, in the present moment, the reality of The Buddha Nature is immediately manifest before us, appears, like a clear reflection in the mirror. When the barrier of Mu is pierced, it is seen in its entirety, and there is no doubt what Mu is. Dōgen said: “There has never been any time which was not time having come nor any Buddha Nature which was not the Buddha Nature manifesting before us.” There is therefore nothing in real time, conditions and circumstances from which we should feel any need for retreat or disengagement, or indeed any aspect of real time, conditions and circumstances from which retreat or disengagement is actually possible. Nothing impedes us from appreciating that in the present moment of real time, conditions and circumstances the lived-experience of Buddha Nature is manifesting. There was nothing to impede the monk’s sight when he questioned Joshu about the Buddha Nature of a dog and there is nothing impeding us from penetrating the barrier of Mu. If the kōan blocks us, and generally it does, it’s because we hide from ourselves in an inattentive reluctance to reflect real time conditions and circumstances, as they are. Note There are a few published translations of the Mahaparanirvana Sūtra available in book format and online. For consistency and ease of reading I have adapted the verses I have used to align with the terminology in other translated materials I have used. I have referred to the Nishijima and Cross translation of Eihei Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo (and in particular the Busshō fascicle). The quotation from the Song of the Precious Mirror Samadhi is from the translation by Taigen Dan Leighton, published in Cultivating the Empty Field. The edition of the Mumonkan I referred to is The Gateless Barrier, Zen Comments on the Mumonkan, by Zenkei Shiayama Roshi. The two dialogues about the Buddha Nature of a dog can be found in The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, by James Green. The Calligraphic kanji, Mu, is by Brigitte D'Ortschy (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported) |