One of the most powerful images of Zen practice, or zazen as all of life, comes from Master Dogen in the Shobogenzo, his masterwork: 

Life can be compared to a time when a person is sailing a boat. On this boat, you are working the sail, you manage the rudder, you are handling the pole. At the same time, the boat is carrying you, and there is no “you” to sail without the boat. By your sailing of the boat, this boat is made to be a boat. Please study and understand profoundly just this instant of the present. Understand this fully. At this very instant, everything is nothing other than the world of the boat. The sky, the water, and the shore have all become this time of the boat, which is very different from what this time would be if there were no boat. Thus, life is what you make of it, and you are what life is making of you. While you are sailing in the boat, your body and mind, self and environment, are all essential pivot points of the boat; and the entire earth and all of space are all essential pivot points of the boat. That is to say, life is the self, and the self is life. 

A rarity in our never-resting, never-satisfied, always running and chasing lives, the Zen practice of shikantaza, or “just sitting,” is sacred, whole, and complete on its own.

To be sure, what one does with body and mind while sitting is not to be neglected: assuming a balanced and stable posture; putting aside judgments of good and bad, likes and dislikes; not grabbing on to thoughts; not chasing after special states; returning to the breath, posture, and open awareness if one becomes tangled in thoughts and emotions. Yet, Master Dogen explained the simple act of sitting as a sacred action, the one place to be and one necessary act, and the fulfillment of all goals and desires. As Master Dogen put it, when sitting shikantaza, “There is nothing lacking. This zazen is all the sutras and commentaries. The Buddha seeing the Buddha is just this time of zazen.” When modern teachers leave out this description of shikantaza as wholly complete, they rob the practice of its real force.

Dogen’s analogy to sailing in the Shobogenzo is apt. Shikantaza is like sailing when the action of the boat moving through the water is whole and complete without any need for arriving at some port. The point and goal of sailing one’s boat is just sailing—the fulfillment of all that comes on the voyage in each instant. It’s sailing for sailing’s sake. There is no destination, no peak, no valley. In fact, the sailing itself is a constant arrival. One can never be off course on this trip to right here.

Naturally one tries to stay on a course, not to crash into the rocks, and not to sink. And it’s advisable not to get tangled in stormy weather. One certainly can have goals in life, and places to visit on the journey. One should seek to sail skillfully, keeping one’s lines clean and bow pointed away from the rocks and rough seas. However, even as we do so, that is really not what makes fine sailing in the analogy of shikantaza. It’s a wonderful trip, and this act of sailing is whole and complete even if one does crash into a reef, capsize, and go under.

After all, if we are just like waves of the water returning to the sea where we are all along, how can we drown? Even though we work to stay alive and afloat as long as possible, we are ultimately just water returning to the waters.

Shikantaza is radically nondemanding and goalless in that way. (Still, let us do what we can not to drown!) 

The post The Koan of Zazen Sailing appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The following is translated from the 29th fascicle of Dogen’s Shobogenzo (Eye of Real Dharma). Dogen (1200-1253) brought Soto Zen to Japan from China. His collection of works known as the Shobogenzo is a foundational work in Japanese Zen and has been translated many times. But this translation is a little different. Of this new translation, Kidder Smith writes: “[Dogen’s] language is a unique grapholect, jumpy and precise. But whereas his sentences tend to be lengthy, layered, folding rapturously back on and through themselves, that is, of the nature of mind, mine are blunt and short. Perhaps someone may yet devise an English prose that fully manifests his beauty. So here we have his speech, from which perhaps we may discern his mind, from which we may discern an unknowing.”

for Takeyoshi

1. Right now
Right now, we mountains and waters, we embody old ways, with you, on thrones, we accomplish all activity. This life, from before something or nothing, secrets of riding cloud and wind.

2. Green mountains
Green mountains constantly walking. Holding all activity, constantly abiding, constantly walking. Because it’s walking, it’s constant. Please look at this closely.

3. Same or different
Mountains walking, humans walking. To know this walking is to seize the root.

4. Doubting
Green mountains walking fast as wind, even faster. Even in the mountains we may not know this. The mountains is where flowers bloom. Outside the mountains we don’t know this, that’s how it is.

If we doubt this walking, we don’t yet know our own walking. It’s not that we don’t walk, we just don’t know it yet, it’s not yet clear to us.

5. Reality
We mountains have never been real, nor have we ever been unreal. You have never been real, nor have you ever been unreal. This moment we expunge all doubt about green mountains walking.

6. Mountains fluxing
Please study green mountains from every point of view, and clearly investigate your own walking as well as ours. Walking forward and backward, stepping into it and out, investigate this too.

Then investigate how walking forward and walking backward haven’t ceased for a moment since before there was something-nothing. Should walking lapse, then the ancestors can’t show up. Should walking end, then nothing will arise. A ceaseless walking forward, a ceaseless walking backward. This is mountains flowing and flowing mountains.

7. Our face
Green mountain practice is walking and east mountain practice is traveling by water. All over the place we practice like this, our face never alters.

8. Drowning
If you don’t receive our walking, if you don’t receive our traveling by water, this is calumny. Don’t drown in that.

9. Ancestors
And still our activity manifests in form and life-force. Walking. Flowing. The moment when we give birth to our mountain child. We manifest ancestors because we accord with ancestral principle.

10. Scraps of sky
Don’t fret if you only see us as grass, trees, rocks, and cliff-face. Don’t get fooled if you see us as garlands of sublime treasure. Don’t tarry if you see us as the space of exalted practice. If you see us as the pinnacle of all buddhas’ inconceivable activity, just let us be. These are scraps of sky.

11. Zen
Insight, meditation, illumination—these are the claptrap appurtenances of zen. What is green mountains constantly walking, eastern mountains traveling by water? Please look at this closely.

12. Giving birth
Female rocks giving birth at night. (“Night” means when we give birth.) In general there are male rocks and female rocks, and rocks that are neither male nor female. Sky rocks and earth rocks, patching sky and earth. We’re everywhere, but people mostly don’t know it.

Know the principle of giving birth. At the moment of birth, do mother and child turn into each other? By this birth, the child is the mother. By this birth, the mother is the child. Please look at this closely.

13. Cloudgate
Master Cloudgate says, “You east mountains travel by water.” He said this because all of us mountains are east mountains, and every mountain travels by water. The nine great mountains all manifest realization, so we’re all called “east mountains.” But can Cloudgate also strip off our skin, flesh, bone, and marrow? (The Buddhist people in China these days are all idiots.)

14. Splashing
We east mountains traveling by water — this is the ancestors’ marrow. All waters emerge at the feet of east mountains, so all mountains ride clouds and walk the sky. All mountains are the peaks of all waters. We walk on water, up and down, our toes in all waters, splashing all waters in all directions. This is realization.

15. Milk
Waters are not hard and soft, wet and dry, moving and still, cold and hot, real and unreal, nor are we enlightened and confused. When we freeze, we’re harder than diamond, you can’t crush us. When we melt, we’re gentler than milk, you can’t crush us. These are in every respect our manifest activities.

16. Seeing water
Look at the precise moment when waters of the ten directions appear as waters of the ten directions. This is not studying when humans or deities see water, it’s when waters realize waters as waters. Look at this, and at the main roads where self meets self. Then go up and down the back roads where other encounters other. Then abandon this.

In general, we see mountains and waters according to our being. Some see water as strands of jeweled ornaments. But they don’t see jeweled ornaments as water. What forms do we humans see that they would call water? Are their jewel strands what we see as water?

Some see water as blossoms adorning the cosmos. But they don’t use those flowers as water. Hunger-beings see water as fierce fire, or as pus and blood. Dragons see it as palaces, other beings see it as forest walls, or as original enlightenment. Human beings see it as water. All this depends on where you
were born, on whether you kill water or give it life.

17. The generosity of water
Everyone has water, but there is no water. Water doesn’t appear according to body, mind, deeds, self or other, its liberation is according to water. Though it’s not earth-water-fire-air-space, it still manifests as earth-water-fire-air-space of its own accord.

So how do our palaces and lands come into being right now? Do you ask because you think they depend on somewhere to abide? Everything is liberated. Nothing abides. Unbound, we abide on our thrones.

18. Dropping into pools
When human beings look at water, we always see it as flowing. There are many kinds of flow — we see only the edge of them. Water flows through earth, through sky, on earth, under earth. It curves about, it streams into the Great Vortex, it mounts clouds, it drops into pools.

19. Water is light
Wenzi speaks of water’s way: “It ascends to sky as rain and dew. It descends to earth as river and stream.” Though water is unaware of water’s way, it still functions nicely as water. Though water is not unaware of water’s way, it still functions nicely as water.

“Water ascends to sky as rain.” It mounts high heaven, it’s inside flame, in thinking, analysis, discrimination, in awareness itself, there’s nowhere it doesn’t get.

“Water descends to earth as rivers,” whose marrow is the sages. Water’s not just rivers and seas, it makes rivers and seas from within water. When it gets to earth, it has all the virtue of rivers and seas. Uncounted lands of the buddha manifest inside a single drop. Nonetheless, there is no water inside the lands, nor lands within water.

When we humans and dragons see palaces of wood or water, we don’t necessarily understand that they’re flowing, just as mountains are. Should a bystander explain their flow to us, we’d both be shocked. Please study whether there is water in the house of the ancestors.

20. The sound of mountains
Mountains outpace past and present, we’re where sages abide. Sages know us as their secret dwelling, as their body-mind. They bring us here, yet no trace of our visiting survives.

Please inscribe this way in skin-flesh-bone-marrow, in the karmas of your body-mind, in something and in nothing. Even in trees and rocks, even in fields and towns.

We mountains are part of the nation, but still more we are part of our lovers. When we’re in love, sages enter us. When sages live in us, we are part of one another, so trees and rocks luxuriate, and birds and animals grow numinous and full. We’re truly fond of sages.

21. Hooking water
We ancient sages always abide with water. When we abide with water, we hook fish, we hook men, we hook the way, all in stylish water ways. We even hook the self, hook the hook, get hooked by the hook, get hooked by the way. This water is the palace of real dragons, who don’t just float away. If we regard it as casual flow, then flowing slanders water as badly as if we’d said “not flowing.”

22. Hiding mountains
In jewels there are hiding mountains, in swamps there are hiding mountains, in space there are hiding mountains, in mountains there are hiding mountains.

Please study mountains hiding in hiding.

23. Mountains
Here’s the thing, we mountains aren’t mountains, we’re mountains. Water’s just water, water activity, it’s not flowing.

♦

From Abruptly Dogen (Punctum Books, 2022). Readers can download the book for free here.

The post Sutras of Mountain and Water appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Zen Buddhist Literature has a reputation for being confounding, yet in many cases the challenges of the texts are a positive feature. The verbal puzzles called koans, for instance, are designed to be so impenetrable that the student is pushed to break through to a nonconceptual understanding. One of the most influential, and perhaps most perplexing, Zen texts is the Shobogenzo, a collection of writings by the 13th-century master Eihei Dogen, founder of the Japanese Soto Zen school. The Shobogenzo contains nuanced discourses on such subjects as the nature of reality, time, and enlightenment.

Although Dogen’s meaning often can be elusive, his intention was not to bewilder but to expound on subtle subjects as clearly as he could. Many of the passages seem cryptic in part because Dogen alludes to Chinese cultural forms and literature that today’s readers do not recognize.

At the Zen Life & Meditation Center in Chicago, Roshi Robert Joshin Althouse recently gave a dharma talk on the Shobogenzo’s most frequently cited section, the Genjokoan.

When it comes to spiritual truths and the authentic teaching of Buddhism and Zen, they don’t get much better than Dogen’s Genjokoan. I have read many different translations of the Genjokoan, and I find Dharmavidya David Brazier’s new translation, called The Dark Side of the Mirror, to be the clearest. It’s often assumed that the Genjokoan is a series of different teachings, but what this new translation makes clear is that this teaching is one piece of cloth all the way through.

To understand what Dogen is saying, we need to put ourselves into the mindset of a 13th-century monastic. Our style of practice at the Zen Life & Meditation Center in Chicago is less traditional, and our members are mostly lay practitioners. Dogen, however, was a very religious man, and this is a religious text.

Dogen’s early life was full of tragedy and misfortune. He lost his father when he was 2 and his mother when he was 8, and he felt this very acutely. As he was watching the incense smoke rise over his mother’s casket, he vowed to ordain as a Buddhist monk, and when he turned 13, he did so. He spent four years at a Tendai monastery on Mount Hiei, which was the main Buddhist center of Japan at the time. While he was there, a deep question arose in him about the teaching of original enlightenment, a dominant teaching that claimed we’re all inherently, intrinsically awake. And the question that arose for him was this: if we are already awake, then why must we practice so rigorously?

Dogen left Mount Hiei to study at Kenninji, a Rinzai Zen monastery, in Kyoto. But he was still dissatisfied and traveled with his teacher Myozen to study in China, which the Japanese considered to be a more authentic spiritual center. Myozen, and eventually Dogen, were accepted to the temple on Mount Tiantong.

One day, Dogen heard the temple’s abbot, Rujing, scolding another monk and telling him to drop off “body-mind,” and when Dogen heard that phrase, he had a “sudden awakening,” or kensho. A year later, Dogen received transmission from Rujing. By the time he returned to Japan about five years later (1233), he was really enthusiastic about teaching the buddhadharma.

This is when he writes the Genjokoan, this profound spiritual text.

The Genjokoan was written as a letter to a lay Buddhist practitioner or possibly a Confucian. We don’t know what the practitioner had asked, but we have to assume that Dogen wrote something that a layperson could understand, and that he wasn’t trying to be esoteric.

As David Brazier points out, you have to appreciate how, through his experience in China and his upbringing in a Japanese aristocratic family, Dogen was steeped in Chinese culture. Just as we are steeped in a cultural context that is secular, scientific, and humanistic, Dogen was soaked in Daoism and Confucianism. In spite of this larger context, however, Dogen always considered himself a Buddhist.

The central teaching in the Genjokoan uses the image of being a mirror, the dark side of the mirror. Daoist teachings help clarify and bring this important metaphor to life.

Though one may deeply understand the forms of body and mind, though one may deeply understand what the body and mind are saying, still, this is not a reflection in a mirror, nor like the moon in the water, which is only realized on one side when the other side is dark.

This is the crux of the whole Genjokoan. He’s saying that when you look at your reflection in water, there’s a tipping point: either the water’s transparent or it’s murky and reflective like a mirror. It doesn’t gradually become a mirror. It’s either a mirror or it isn’t. Dogen is using this as a metaphor: when you drop off the body-mind, when you forget the self, you become a mirror that reflects the dharma.

Dogen is criticizing the interpretation of original enlightenment that claims one can possess the dharma. One may have kensho, but one may not necessarily be aware of it. Waking up allows you to see and appreciate the dharma, and from this point of view the dharma is what is other than you, because the dharma is unconditioned. You and I are conditioned. To wake up, to be liberated, is to be able to reflect the buddhadharma, as it is, without your projection. You don’t possess enlightenment. It possesses you.

To make this point, Dogen alludes to Daoist ideas about yin and yang. The concept of yin and yang is very dialectical. You’re either on one side or the other. And if you go too far to either extreme, you can flip to the other side. Yang is the active, masculine principle, and yin is the receptive, feminine principle. Daoism would say that you should dwell on the yin side as much as possible, because it’s receptive and can see the other side. When we are on the yang side, we tend to be blind and act out in ways that are unbalanced. We need to use this male energy to be in the world, but once we’ve accomplished the task at hand, it’s wise to return to the yin side.

Dogen builds his entire argument around this central metaphor of the dark side of the mirror that reflects the buddhadharma. Later on he uses more opposites and pairs: Fish and birds, Buddhist enlightenment and delusion, shore and the boat, firewood and ash. He’s using these metaphors constantly throughout the Genjokoan, and he says the same thing over and over and over again: be on the yin side. He’s saying this: To get over yourself, appreciate what is other than you and get on with living, being liberated, free of the karma that we create. Trust the universe and let it carry you along.

When Dogen says that to study Buddhism is to study the self, he is inviting you to let go of your secondhand experience and see directly. Study your human nature, your habits, your thoughts, your behavior—and you may discover you are not as interesting as you thought. To wake up is to discover your authentic self, which is always firsthand and outside all contrivances and conventions.

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) defined religious consciousness as the ability to make a distinction between what is mundane and what is sacred. Without enlightenment, we just have humanistic psychology or mindfulness, but that’s not the same as mindfulness in the context of a genuine spiritual path of awakening. And that’s not what Dogen is teaching. Dogen is very clear about enlightenment. He’s saying that’s the point—to wake up.

At the same time, Dogen is completely realistic. He’s not talking about an ideal of enlightenment. He’s talking about the actual living transmission of the dharma. The first four lines of the Genjokoan illustrate this point well. The passage starts off with Dogen talking about the Buddhist teachings from the outside, the yang side. As David Brazier translates:

Birth and death, practice and daily life, delusion and enlightenment, ordinary beings and all the Buddhas; such is the Buddha dao [Buddha way], Buddha’s dharma of all dharmas.

Then Dogen talks about experiencing the teachings for yourself. (Note that the term that Dogen uses for the Buddha way is Buddha dao, which carries a greater sense of the Chinese thought encompassing it.)

As the myriad dharmas are other than self, when one is in their midst, there are no creating and destroying, no sentient beings and all buddhas, no delusion and enlightenment.

He has moved to the yin side, where all those dualities disappear. Then, in the third line, he unifies the first two lines:

Out of abundance and lack, springs forth the original dao of Buddha, and for this there is making and destroying, delusion and enlightenment, and there are living buddhas.

He’s talking about when you are that mirror reflecting the buddhadharma. There is no self here, and the world is sacred through and through.

It’s possible to get stuck here—to think you’ve finally arrived—but the path is always the goal. Practice is enlightenment. With the fourth line, he throws cold water on you:

So it is and nevertheless, blossoms fall bittersweet and weeds spread amidst woeful resignations.

You just woke up. You just finished a seven-day sesshin [meditation retreat] and your samadhi [meditative concentration] is very strong. You are enjoying this peaceful, calm, and spacious awareness, but little by little, day by day it slowly fades. So you might feel slightly depressed that such clarity doesn’t seem to last. You are still subject to impermanence. Your body is going to get old, you’re going to get sick, and you’re going to suffer. You won’t return to delusion in the same way—but you will still have to deal with problems and difficulties. This is what is meant by the koan of Genjokoan.

The typical Chinese characters for koan roughly mean “a public case.” But Dogen is not using those characters here, and he doesn’t do anything by accident or use words haphazardly. The characters he uses for koan refer to equality or balance.

Here, he’s bringing in a Confucian element, the principle of li, which means to perform rites correctly so that heaven and earth remain in balance along with the natural right ordering of daily life. This includes just doing your duties, like if you have a family member who’s sick and you have to take care of them instead of going out to a party.

Dogen is saying that enlightenment includes this Confucian idea of li, which is not a passive thing. You actually become engaged in some way with your community, your sangha, the world, your family. The koan of the Genjokoan is whatever circumstance you’re in. Your challenge is to take your place there, accept that situation, and work with it.

For Dogen, nonduality is not an abstract philosophy about the absolute and relative. He uses it as a practical tool. He says that when you are that mirror and you realize genjo, you manifest the truth of the phenomenal world and you have a responsibility to engage in the world. You have to do something. So when you give life to your life wholeheartedly by accepting what is right here, which is koan, then genjo is what manifests.

The Genjokoan begins with a reference to the buddha dao and ends with a discussion of li. But throughout he is talking about faith, a faith in the buddhadharma and a faith that is supported by rigorous practice.

He is saying, again and again, forget yourself, be humble, be modest. Whatever your circumstance, whether high or low, good or bad, that’s your life just as it is, so right here is always Genjokoan. But don’t be complacent. He warns that if you think you understand the dharma, then you probably don’t. Don’t think you’ve arrived at some place where there is no more work to be done. Wherever you’ve arrived is just a jumping off place for the next thing that you need to do. Don’t just drop off body-mind. Drop off the dropped-off body-mind.

The post After Awakening appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This has been a season of social distancing, a time of practice from afar, of empty meditation halls and shuttered retreat centers. While the Buddha’s own journey was at times solitary, his way has often been followed in groups. The earliest sutras are filled with stories of large gatherings of followers—dozens or hundreds of monks, nuns, and laypeople—all practicing together. At the first recitation of one famous verse of the Dhammapada, it is said that 30,000 monks in attendance realized awakening. The tradition of “leaving home” to pursue the three jewels of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha, or community of practitioners, has been a central narrative of Buddhist practice from the start.

Not this year. This is a year of staying home.

How perfect then that Kuya Minogue, resident priest at the British Columbia retreat Sakura-ji (formerly Creston Zendo), chose this moment to publish Mountains and Rivers Sutra, a collection of teachings by the California Zen teacher Norman Fischer, that Minogue has compiled into a series of 52 weekly home practices.

In a way, the genesis of this book began in 1971. A young student named Carl Bielefeldt at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center sat down with the great teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, who had founded the monastery as well as the San Francisco Zen Center (SFZC), and the two of them began to translate the “Mountains and Rivers Sutra,” a tricky chapter from the medieval Zen master Eihei Dogen’s masterwork, the Shobogenzo. Dogen was the founder of Soto Zen in Japan, one of the two major Japanese lineages now well represented here in the West, and the Shobogenzo is his most famous collection of teachings. Bielefeldt didn’t think much of his progress on the chapter and abandoned the project for academic studies after Suzuki’s untimely death later that year. (He went on to become a distinguished professor at Stanford University and a renowned scholar of East Asian religion.) But the draft he left behind cast a long shadow on American Zen. Suzuki’s myriad disciples, and those of other Zen sanghas, have been studying—and retranslating—this chapter for some 50 years since then.

Minogue’s book continues this tradition. She begins with a full translation of the “Mountains and Rivers Sutra,” though this one is by Kazuaki Tanahashi—another teacher and translator in SFZC’s wide orbit. Then each of the 52 chapters follows a simple pattern: a teaching on some aspect of Dogen’s chapter from Norman Fischer, a suggested practice from Minogue, and a few responses contributed by her students.

Fischer is a former co-abbot of SFZC, where he carried the mantle of Suzuki Roshi for five years in the 1990s and continues to teach today. A longtime fixture of the affiliated Green Gulch Farm, he also leads a nearby sangha of his own, the Everyday Zen Foundation. Yet his influence extends well beyond the sylvan suburbs of California’s Marin County.

Fischer gave these talks on the “Mountains and Rivers Sutra” at New Mexico’s Upaya Zen Center in 2012, and Minogue faithfully transcribed them before dividing them into the book’s 52 teachings, each taking up no more than a page or so. She then established an “email Zen practice group” of seven women scattered around the world, from Australia to Kenya. They went through the teachings week by week, exchanging thoughts and practices online, and their responses are sampled at the end of each chapter.

With the publication of this book, we can all join this unique virtual sangha.

Dogen’s writing is said to be challenging even in Japanese. In English it can sometimes feel impenetrable, dense with apparent paradoxes and puzzles. This selection from the Shobogenzo is no exception, filled with the likes of mountains walking—and even walking on water. “Mountains’ walking is just like human walking,” Dogen insists. “Accordingly, do not doubt mountains’ walking even though it does not look the same as human walking.”

Yet beneath the surface, Dogen is making a more basic point. As Fischer describes in the book’s second teaching:

Dogen believed that we are not appreciating what life actually is. Zen practice is nothing more than appreciating life as it is, and then living it fully every moment. … He is not saying there is no path and no destination; but he is saying that the destination is every point along the path.

Minogue’s weekly practice suggestions are similarly delightfully concrete. Her first is simply this: “Take some time to go for a walk, preferably on a mountain trail by a creek.” In her third, she suggests we “visit the confluence of two nearby rivers.” While perhaps those dwelling in more urban jungles cannot follow such instructions to the letter, all of us can observe the spirit, “listen[ing] to the sounds all around us,” becoming “aware of the sounds that come from water and the sounds that come from the mountains.” Elsewhere, Minogue’s practices are more purely philosophical:

In the next week, notice the various ways in which you look to the future to bring you lasting happiness. Then see true happiness right here, right now.

Minogue’s book comes on the heels of another companion to Dogen’s chapter, Shohaku Okumura’s The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioner’s Guide to Dogen’s “Sansuikyo,” published in 2018. (There is some ambiguity about whether the title refers to “rivers” or “waters.” Even the esteemed scholar Carl Bielefeldt—who had worked on the sutra in 1971—has used both words.) Okumura’s book is based on lectures he gave at the San Francisco Zen Center in 2002; he has since established his own sangha, the Sanshin Zen Community in Bloomington, Indiana. His book is a more traditional commentary, beginning with a revised translation by Bielefeldt and then proceeding nearly line by line through the text. Okumura also includes a thorough introduction to Dogen’s life and work and two closing essays, by Bielefeldt and the poet Gary Snyder.

To Okumura, Dogen’s chapter is not really about mountains or waters. “Rather, Dogen says mountains and waters are themselves sutra—they unceasingly expound the Buddha’s teaching.” Realizing this, we are awakened by the ordinary as much as by the profound. While Fischer and Okumura each reflect unique perspectives in their commentary, on this point these two modern Zen masters largely agree. The two very different books complement each other well—Okumura’s more formal and meticulous, Minogue’s more structured and experiential.

If mountains and waters can be our teachers, then so can emails, texts, video conferences, and all the ephemera of life at a distance. Whether you are cooped up at home as you read this or at last roaming freely through the wider wilderness, consider exploring Dogen’s timeless teachings. Both of these books will be invaluable guides.

And if this year’s challenges are feeling insurmountable, you can always skip to Minogue’s final practice instruction: “Take a day off and then do zazen eternally.”

The post Students of Mountains and Rivers appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What first drew me to Buddhism many years ago was the clarity of the teachings. The stages of the path were neatly laid out, and they came with a set of instructions that appealed to my can-do approach to just about anything I undertook. I set off on a path, and the goal, however limited my understanding of it, seemed to hold great promise.

For some, this approach is all that’s needed for a lifetime of practice. But for me, as for most others I know, the path took unexpected twists and turns, putting me up against the limits of my agency. It wasn’t long before my enthusiasm sagged under the weight of expectation—what Joseph Goldstein might call “the craving for becoming” (see “Peeling Away the Promise of Desire”). My goal—awakening—was thwarted by my very desire for it. To tell the truth, my wish for it was little more than vanity, a desire to become someone other than who I was, someone better, maybe even perfect. The distinction between selfish craving and open aspiration was lost on me.

In speaking with others, I soon discovered that virtually every practitioner has experienced this. In fact, it is so common that I fear overstating the obvious. But how we respond to this impasse varies widely. Some, like Tricycle features editor Andrew Cooper, ended up on paths quite different from the ones they’d first set out on (see “Regret: A Love Story”). For others, like me, encounters with other traditions provided a jolt that loosened the sometimes linear, goal-driven quality we can give our practice. There is room in Buddhism for a variety of approaches, and it was exposure to other schools’ discourses on enlightenment that shed light on my dilemma.

“The Liberation of Buddhism is liberation from self, not liberation of self,” writes Dharmavidya David Brazier in “Performing the Ritual of Life.” The subject of his essay is Eihei Dogen (1200–1253), founder of the Soto Zen school, and his writing on satori, or awakening. Dialectical and dynamic, Dogen’s writing is impossible to pin down, forever contradicting itself, thriving as it does on paradox. “Dogen does not teach static doctrine,” Brazier writes. “It is difficult to find [his] position on a given matter.” Dogen’s writing, in other words, is much like the elusive nature of life itself. This includes enlightenment, something described by Dogen as discontinuous with delusion, or with any idea we may hold of it.

It is not that this take is for everybody, or that Dogen supersedes all other presentations. But he does offer a perspective that can be applied in one’s life, whatever one’s orientation: that we can find meaning in Buddhism in how we enact it, in the way we live it out. In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Inadvertent, the author expresses something similar in describing an insight that surfaces in the act of writing and the form it demands: “The difference between life as it really unfolds, always in the moment, and the overarching context we interpret it in but never live in will be revealed.”

Whatever course our life and practice takes, it is kept vital by consistently going beyond whatever static ideas we bring to it, even Buddhist ideas. Even Dogen’s own ideas. Orthodoxies of all kinds, including Buddhist, tend to set themselves apart from an inclusive and various take on things. But as life repeatedly reminds us, especially life in our pluralistic world, there is room for so much more than the limits we set—room for clarity and for paradox, for uniformity and for contradiction, for logic and for poetry, for bootstrap effort and for faith, for orthodoxy and for liberality. Our ideas, no matter how profound they feel to us, are part of a larger revealed whole. And that is the home we seek and the home we share. 

The post Our Shared Home appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Japanese scholar and writer D.T. Suzuki, who is widely acknowledged for his role in introducing Zen Buddhism to the West, placed great emphasis in his essays and talks on the experience of satori, “awakening.” “Satori,” he wrote, “is the raison d’être of Zen, without which Zen is not Zen. Therefore every contrivance, disciplinary and doctrinal, is directed toward satori.” The sudden, direct, unmediated, spiritual apprehension of reality that is satori captured the imagination of Westerners hungering for a spiritual answer to the perplexities of life in secular industrial society. While Suzuki focused on the experience of satori, however, he did not give much attention to the matter of how that esteemed experience was to be attained.

In the mid-1960s, Philip Kapleau’s book The Three Pillars of Zen addressed precisely that issue, and its publication helped catalyze the wave of new Zen practitioners that rose then and subsequently. The three pillars of the title are teaching, practice, and enlightenment, and the book includes first-person accounts of satori experiences in the context of Zen training. (Throughout the book, Kapleau prefers to use the near-equivalent term kensho, “seeing one’s nature.”) With the publication of Three Pillars, the enlightenment experience described by Suzuki was brought home as something that was within the reach of regular people—such as the book’s readers—if they applied themselves to diligent practice under the guidance of a qualified teacher. According to Three Pillars, kensho is not only possible; it is, as it was for Suzuki, essential, and serious Zen practitioners are enjoined to apply themselves singlemindedly and with utmost determination to its attainment.

At the same time that The Three Pillars of Zen was gaining popularity, a very different approach was being taught by Shunryu Suzuki, the founder and abbot of the rapidly growing San Francisco Zen Center community. In 1971, an edited collection of Shunryu Suzuki’s talks on Zen practice, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, was published, and it soon became as influential among Zen students as Three Pillars. Shunryu Suzuki taught a way of Zen practice very different from what is found in the works of D. T. Suzuki (no relation) or in Three Pillars, not least in his approach to satori: “We practice zazen to express our true nature, not to attain enlightenment. Bodhidharma’s Buddhism [i.e., Zen] is to be practice, to be enlightenment.” For Shunryu Suzuki, kensho was not unimportant, but it was “not the part of Zen that needed to be stressed.”

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Three Pillars were for years the core texts for Zen students, playing a pivotal role in establishing Zen practice in the West. Given the influence of these two pioneering texts and their sharp differences in approaching satori, it is little wonder that the matter even now continues to engender both debate and confusion.

Holding these contradictory perspectives side by side, satori emerges as a highly elusive matter. This elusiveness is furthered still when one considers that satori can refer not only to a sudden experience of spiritual illumination but also to a transformed, awakened condition of being. To explore this matter fully, one has to go back to the writings of the preeminent figure in Japanese Zen, Eihei Dogen (1200–1253), particularly the synthesis of his ideas in his most famous work, Genjokoan.

Dogen’s way is dialectical and dynamic. Dogen does not teach static doctrine. It is difficult to find Dogen’s position on a given matter; he may say something on one page and on the next page contradict that exact point. Dogen teaches a way of thinking and of being that endlessly transcends the given. He works with paradox. The given paradox of one’s lot, if fully lived, is naturally subsumed by a new, more encompassing paradox which in turn is subsumed by one still more encompassing. Dogen is not so much putting forward a point of view as demonstrating this ever-moving, ever-unfolding process. Dogen’s writings give active form to the mantra at the conclusion of the Heart Sutra, which says: “Go beyond, and go beyond that, and go beyond again, and then again.”

In fact, Dogen’s discussion of satori encompasses a number of seeming paradoxes. He asserts, for instance, that the state of satori is totally different from ordinary deluded existence, and he is at pains to emphasize this difference and the divide between them. They are, for example, as different as firewood and ash. He writes:

Firewood becomes ash.
It cannot become firewood again.
However, we should not see it as ash after and firewood before.
We should understand the dharma position of firewood: it has a before and after, the before and after exist, but it is not cut off from them.
As for the dharma position of ash, it has a before and an after.
The firewood has become ash and cannot become like firewood again.

Firewood represents delusion, and ash represents awakening. Dogen is saying that while a deluded person may become enlightened, enlightenment is not continuous with delusion. Delusion is one thing, and enlightenment is another. Ash cannot go back to being firewood. Delusion has its before and after, which we call karma. Satori also has its own before and after, but the continuity of satori is not with the deluded life that preceded it. The continuity of satori is with beginningless satori.

Life is one position in time, and death is one position in time, just like, for example, winter and spring. Do not think that winter becomes spring. Do not think that spring becomes summer.

The deluded person dies, and a buddha is born. The deluded person does not turn into a buddha, and a buddha does not go back to being a deluded person. Rather, awakening means that the deluded person has been forgotten, dropped away. Having stressed the discontinuity of delusion and enlightenment, however, Dogen also says that a person who has experienced satori might not even consciously know that it has happened. One does not need to know, as personal knowledge, that one is enlightened. Satori is not a personal attribute or achievement.

A deluded person might have the ambition to become enlightened, but that very ambition negates enlightenment. There is no method or technique that will securely bring one from one side to the other. For Dogen, satori is something that happens when the balance of conditions is right or, we could say, when a certain tipping point is crossed. But the crossing of this point is not something that an individual can plan, control, or make happen by deliberation.

Dogen describes this tipping point as being like the moment when water becomes a mirror. If you are standing at the side of a lake and you look at the water, you can perhaps see the fish and the waterweed and even the rocks on the bottom. At a certain point, however, the light may change, and instead of seeing the bed of the lake you see the clouds in the sky above. The water surface has suddenly become a mirror, which symbolizes satori. Water is sometimes transparent and sometimes a mirror. It is the mirror mind that is enlightenment.

Dogen employs the image of the moon reflected in a dewdrop to press this point further. Even a dewdrop—even the smallest dewdrop—can reflect the whole moon. Furthermore, the depth of the reflection is as deep as the moon is high. In this way, Dogen tells us how even an ordinary being can reflect the moon of the dharma and fill the world with light. The person who considers himself to be nothing may be an enlightened being, whereas the one who considers himself to be something almost certainly isn’t.

Satori can refer not only to a sudden experience of spiritual illumination but also to a transformed, awakened condition of being.

Dogen’s teachings on satori can be frustrating, since he seems to say that there is nothing you can do about it. There is no practice or method that will result in your having satori. But he doesn’t just leave us there. Satori is, for Dogen, a darkening of the self, a principle that has roots as much in Daoism as in the Buddhist doctrine of non-self. The person who takes a position of humility is the one most likely to pass through satori. Furthermore, the darker the person the better will be the moon’s reflection, and the lower the person the deeper will be the reflection. Thus he advocates a dynamic humility.

The darkening of the self entails a total, complete and unconditional acceptance of one’s lot. This kind of acceptance is a turning around in one’s way of seeing things, such that self no longer has any special claim. Accepting one’s lot is not a kind of nihilistic or static withdrawal from engagement with life. It makes possible action that is not based on indulging the ego but is, rather, clean and positive. It is when there is total acceptance that change occurs naturally.

Dogen uses the Confucian term li to clarify this point. Li originally meant the correct performance of traditional religious rites. In ancient China it was considered essential for the living both to maintain a correct relationship with the ancestors and the balance between heaven and earth. This was done through ritual, which entailed laying aside self and giving power over to the Way, or Dao, of heaven. When one lived in accordance with the Dao, all would be well. For the Chinese, the three religions of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism were all intimately interrelated. In Chinese Buddhism, the Buddha’s awakening was understood as being an awakening to the Dao, and li was the practical expression of this as the then natural right ordering of daily life.

Related: The Essential Teachings of Dogen

To have an intellectual understanding of satori does not get one far at all. The master meeting the disciple and hearing the latter’s account of his practice is not interested in clever ideas; he is interested in seeing evidence of li. Li is the right performance of the ritual of life. That ritual involves one with others and with all that is other. We talk about “environment,” putting the emphasis upon what is around us, but in satori one is part of it. It is not there for us; we have a duty to it and that duty is our lot, our part in the ritual. If we fail to perform it, relations between heaven and earth will break down and tragedy will ensue. It is a point that should not be lost on us today, standing as we do on the brink of ecological extinction as a result of human hubris.

This is the Buddhism that Dogen learned during his years of study in China; it is the dharma that was transmitted to him by his teacher Rujing; and it is the Zen that he established upon his return to Japan. To the present day, Soto Zen training entails a multitude of rules and regulations about the smallest details of daily life. This is the working of li, and in li the self is negated. It is no wonder, then, that Dogen so challenges the individualistic, secular mind-set of modern Westerners.

It would, however, be a mistake to see Dogen’s message as solely to do with the Soto school. This was not his intention, and he rejected being thus limited. Dogen was describing a possibility of liberation applicable for all people in all situations.

Many years ago, I worked as a social worker in a regional spinal injury unit in the north of England. A number of the patients were young men in the prime of their strength who had had a motorcycle accident or had fallen off a roof or had another similarly devastating accident that caused irreparable paralysis. There were two treatment modes in the unit. In one, patients were confronted with what had happened as soon as they came out of anesthesia: You are paralyzed, you will never walk again. In the other group, the news was broken more slowly and gently. The former group typically fell quickly into depression. However, at a six-month follow-up, those patients were doing a lot better than the members of the other group, who in the long term tended to become much more severely incapacitated. Those who took on their new situation, deeply accepting their lot, learned how to race wheelchairs along the hospital corridors. Those who did not accept it just lingered on. I found here something akin to Dogen’s teachings.

For Dogen, satori is a change of heart that comes about when one accepts one’s lot in a deep and dynamic fashion, no matter what a shock it may be to do so, and then lives one’s life to the full as one finds it. There is always something to get on with. This is li.

At the time of satori, a person might see visions or might not see visions, might have great realization or might not be aware that anything happened. The test lies not in epiphenomena that appear at the time but in the subsequent demeanor and behavior of the person. You can’t fake it. When a real change of heart has occurred, the world is a different place.

At the end of Genjokoan, Dogen tells a story from Zen lore:

Zen Master Baoji was using a fan.

A passing monk approached and asked, “The nature of wind is that it is always abiding. There is no place that the always abiding nature of wind does not encompass. What is the old priest holding on to that he needs to use a fan?”

The teacher answered, “Even though you know that the nature of the wind is to always abide and there is nowhere that it does not reach, you do not know the performance of the Way (Dao li).”

The monk said, “How is it that [knowing that] ‘there being no place it does not reach’ is not the performance of the Way?” The master simply carried on using the fan.

The monk bowed.

The Zen master’s fan here is a ritual object. It is used to occlude the face of the teacher when he or she is giving certain teachings or transmissions. It indicates the darkening the self. The monk is in effect saying to Baojing: “What have you got left to hide that you still need to use a fan? Surely the teaching is that all is pure and immaculate—the dharma wind blows everywhere. If you are an accomplished master, you should not need to use the fan.” The master tells the monk that he understands the teaching but does not understand its li. The monk then presses, “What then is its li?” The master simply continues to use the fan. In doing so, his performance is not an expression of self; it is action benefitting sentient beings.

The liberation of Buddhism is liberation from self, not liberation of self. Wherever life might take us, there is in every situation a li, a way of action that is, as the Chinese might have said, in accord with the way of heaven. If one lives thus, in accord with the Dao, in faith rather than ambition, satori will take care of itself.

The post Performing The Ritual of Life appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

If learning to eat at the monastery was acclimating to the practice of consuming whatever was put in front of me, learning to cook at the monastery was a lesson in how to take care of ingredients. Dogen Zenji wrote, “Not to waste a single grain of rice is called the mind of the way.” This has a similar but slightly different meaning from “A monk’s mouth is like an oven.” The emphasis is on the cook rather than the eater. What Dogen is saying is that not wasting food—taking care of the material around you and preserving what you have—is the totality of Zen life. Zen is difficult, but it is not complicated. It is simply taking care of things.

At the monasteries where I trained, there was an explicit admonition to never throw away food. At Aichi Senmon Nisodo temple in Nagoya, Japan, meals were calculated down to the precise half-bowl of soup, and any leftovers were eaten at dinnertime, mixed into soup or savory rice porridge. We first figured out how many people were expected at the meal. With soup, for example, each person was allotted a bowl and a half; this assured that everyone had at least one serving and then that those who wanted seconds could have them. This is actually very basic common sense. It just involves foresight—for example, knowing how big the bowls are, how much food fits into one bowl, and how much vegetables shrink during cooking.

Related: Food for Enlightenment

The Japanese phrase mottainai is used to express displeasure about wasting. It can be translated as “Don’t waste!” and it’s used to describe instances of throwing away either tangible or intangible things. For example, when I told a young woman in Japan that I didn’t want to get married, she exclaimed, “You’re young! Mottainai!” Back in the United States, when I lament my declining Japanese skills, people often agree, “Mottainai!” And of course, in Japan, if the nuns and I ever considered throwing away some week- old tub of leftover soup, someone would inevitably utter “Mottainai!” And the soup would end up as part of our dinner or creatively incorporated into another dish.

Conserving and respecting food involves equal parts planning how much to cook and repurposing leftovers and old produce. I am not quite sure why I never questioned the reason for peeling carrots until I worked in a monastery kitchen. But really, what is the point of peeling carrots? Mottainai! They taste the same with or without the peel, and the peel contains extra nutrients.

MINDING OUR LEFTOVERS

It is fairly easy to preserve food and deal with leftovers in a Zen monastery, where there is an explicit value placed on not wasting. It is harder to do in a contemporary American household, which is not set up the same way. When I first moved in with Gensan, I tried to save as much as I could. I kept every last scrap of leftovers in the refrigerator and refused to throw away vegetables until they were rotten. If vegetables did go bad before I had a chance to cook them, I mourned their loss. I put old vegetables in soup. I conserved.

But after six months of comfortable domesticity, I found that the refrigerator was packed full of rotting leftovers, half-eaten or rarely used sauce, and obscure oil that I bought on a whim. I had slipped right back into the American way of grocery shopping when I was anxious, stressed, or upset. I stocked the pantry to feel I had a handle on my life, that I was competent as an adult, that I was taking care of my family. I used only a fraction of what I bought.

If you notice you have fallen into this habit, make a list of everything in your refrigerator. That’s right—get an actual piece of paper and write down each and every vegetable, plastic container, and sauce. It’s helpful to divide things into sections like leftovers, produce, and so on. For example, the current contents of my refrigerator are:

• Leftovers: takeout rice and vegetables with peanut sauce from a Thai restaurant
• Old produce: green onions, cilantro, cucumbers, baby bok choi, avocados (very brown), carrots, onions, garlic, limes, cherry tomatoes
• Other: salsa, mustard, peanut butter, sambal oelek, ketchup, tomato sauce, Sriracha, miso, tahini, soy sauce

When you look at these items as a list rather than as amorphous unwanted refrigerator contents, it becomes easy to figure out ways to use them. Stare at your list for a bit and allow the ingredients to dance in front of you; then look for natural resonances between foods and flavor profiles. For example, in the above list avocados and cherry tomatoes with some minced onion, garlic, and lime juice would make a nice guacamole-salsa dip (and I do have chips!). The tiny amount of leftover Thai food could be revamped with the addition of stir-fried onion, bok choi, and carrots in a spicy peanut sauce. If I combined peanut butter, soy sauce, chili oil, sesame oil, and sugar, I would get a delicious sauce (with a kick) that I could garnish with the aging cilantro and green onions.

This is a chance to be creative, to utilize and make the most of the material at hand. Then when you go grocery shopping the next time, write down what you put into the refrigerator and on what date. Cross out food that gets eaten or discarded, so you always know what you have. Using this method, you can keep your refrigerator a lot more civil, and you can train yourself to take care of produce and old food.

Eat what is put in front of you and take care of leftovers. Consume the circumstances of your life, whatever they are, and turn them into fuel. Take care of your community, your house, your family, and your pantry.

WHAT WE WASTE

American culture is not set up in a manner that values preservation. In fact, the message our culture sends us says the opposite—that we should always purchase the new thing, the coolest or freshest thing. We are told that if our refrigerator and pantry are not completely stocked to the brim, we are not successful, we are not providing for our family. The problem with this is not accumulation in and of itself, but that we are not taught how to take care of and value the things we already have.

The same is true with people. People are only worthy of our time and attention if they have value to us personally, if they conform to social norms, if they are easy, pleasant, and attractive. We divide people into categories like “successful,” “failures,” “contributors,” “leeches,” “motivated,” “useless,” “lazy.” Then we allow these words to become the totality of a human being.

We are afraid of difference and weakness. We are afraid of poor people because of the labels we create, and then we become ashamed of our hate and fear. Instead of examining our shame and fear, we keep society’s outcasts at a distance. We treat them like trash and throw them away. We make laws saying they cannot sleep in tents. We make laws saying they cannot sleep on benches. We say they did this to themselves, that they “chose” this life, when nothing could be farther from the truth. (No woman wants to sleep on concrete; it is very painful, not to mention unsafe.) We say they are someone else’s problem. We forget they are human beings just like us.

Bernie Glassman, the Zen teacher famous for his work with the homeless, explained that when we care for the outcasts in society, we are caring for the parts of ourselves that we have rejected, the parts of ourselves we hate or feel shame about. It took me many months before I realized that this is what I was trying to do in my work with addicted clients. Working with people who relapsed over and over, I saw how easily I was frustrated by my clients, how quickly I moved to judgment and then to an impulse to discard them, to punish them by withdrawing kindness and compassion.

Abbess Aoyama Roshi would often say, “How you spend your time is how you live your life.” Spiritual practice shows us that the way we relate to small things—washing dishes, cooking, waiting, cleaning—is indicative of how we relate to everything else. The training in Zen practice is learning how to take care of even the smallest, most mundane task, because the task in front of you is the totality of the universe. So eventually I began to see that the way I was relating to addicted people was how I related to myself. I saw that when I was tired, sad, or struggling, when I didn’t receive labels like “successful,” “beautiful,” “rich,” and “competent,” I hated myself. I felt like trash.

I want to have compassion for the parts of myself I hate—my anger and selfishness, my lust, my introversion, my seriousness. I want to have compassion for these because they are everything that makes me me. But it is hard. We are taught to hate difficult things, difficult emotions, anything that does not contribute to a well-functioning individual. Part of me knows that, in order to have compassion for the world around me, I will have to radically transform how I take care of myself.

Ten years ago, when I was in India on a Buddhist study-abroad program, I had the opportunity to meet the Ogyen Trinley Dorje, one of the two claimants to the title of 17th Karmapa, a reincarnating authority figure in Tibetan Buddhism and head of one of the largest denominations. At the time, he was only about 20 years old—the same age I was. The study-abroad group and I gathered in the Karmapa’s ornate meeting chamber. To my surprise, rather than acting compassionate and expansive, the Karmapa seemed grumpy, restless, and uncomfortable.

A question-and-answer session ensued. Someone from our group asked, “How can I be a good Buddhist?”

The Karmapa scowled. “Don’t try to be a good Buddhist. Go home to your country and be a good citizen, a good family member, a good neighbor. Work on doing good in your community. Don’t worry about Buddhism.”

At the time, I thought he was just being cynical. I thought this was a cop-out answer from a young monk who resented the position he was born into. I now understand what he meant.

What will you do with the hours in your day? How will you treat your heart and the people around you? How will you care for your house and the houses around you? These are questions that our lives continually pose for us, no matter where we are, no matter how fucked-up or enlightened we are. In the East or the West, they are wonderful questions to engage. The best place to find the answers is right where you are, right now.

Zen is famous for its enigmatic riddles and jokes. An empty cup is better than a full cup, because you can fill it with anything. Failure is the mother of success. Mind and body are not one, not two. These may seem confusing at first, but they are descriptions of reality. This isn’t Zen; this is how things are. Nothing cast away is truly trash. What is unlovable deserves love and belonging. Leftovers and old vegetables are new dinner. You must embrace paradox to transform yourself and your life, to create possibility from nothingness. End means beginning.

RECIPE: GOLDEN CURRY

Golden curry is a meal so easy to whip up it does not really warrant its own recipe. It’s one of the few meals I trust my husband, Gensan Thomson, to prepare without my looking over his shoulder the whole time, offering neurotic suggestions. It’s a not-so-spicy Japanese take on Indian curry, most commonly made by using packets of roux that dissolves easily in hot water and thickens into a curry sauce. I mention it here because curry is one of the best ways to get rid of leftovers. Anything can go into curry—old noodles, vegetables, and even lettuce. It’s best not to add anything that already has a distinctive flavor, such as potato salad or vinegar-flavored dishes.

Serves 3

• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• ½ large onion, diced medium
• 2 large potatoes, peeled and cut into bite-size pieces
• 2 carrots, cut into bite-size pieces
• Water
• 1 cup leftovers you feel bad about wasting, such as plain tofu, tomatoes, green beans, lettuce, etc.
• 4 squares (1 x 1 inch each) curry roux

Heat the oil in a deep frying pan, pot, or wok and add the onions. Stir-fry on medium for 2 minutes, until the onions begin to soften. Add the carrots and potatoes and continue to stir-fry for another 3 to 5 minutes, until the vegetables are beginning to soften but have not yet browned.

Add water to the pan until it is 1 inch above the vegetables. Bring to a boil and cook until the potatoes are completely soft, another 10 to 15 minutes. If your leftovers are raw, add them so they get their requisite cooking time and are done when the potatoes are fully cooked. For example, if you are adding green beans, add them about 2 minutes before the potatoes will be done. If your leftovers are already cooked, you can add them at the very end.

Add the roux squares to the boiling water in the pan. Stir, breaking up the roux, until it is completely dissolved (you can also dice or slice the roux before adding it to make sure it doesn’t clump). Continue stirring until the sauce thickens. The consistency should be like yogurt—thick enough that it is clearly not liquid, but soft and gelatinous. If the curry sauce isn’t thickening, add more roux, one piece at a time, waiting a minute between each piece and stirring constantly, until it reaches the desired consistency.

♦

Excerpted from the book Just Enough. Copyright ©2019 by Gesshin Claire Greenwood. Printed with permission from New World Library. 

The post Dogen Said Not to Waste a Single Grain of Rice. Here’s How. appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Working with dying people, I see many houses. After people die, their houses are left behind, often filled to the brim with things that they clearly felt they needed to have, like dozens of statues of lions, thousands of books, many cans of creamed corn, and so on. I’m not talking about hoarders, either—just folks. Humans are like magpies in that way, collecting shiny objects and other things that attract them. Seeing, wanting, grabbing—it seems to be innate. Something we can work with.

I have a very dear friend who has acid reflux. Two of the biggest triggers for his acid reflux are chocolate and gluten, and he knows this. But you should see him in front of a cake counter! He practically licks the glass from so much wanting, because he loves sweets. I understand that. It might seem silly, but I get like that about new iPhones. Whenever a new one comes out, I’m overcome with impulsive thoughts to buy it immediately. I want it now. Luckily for me, it seems like Apple comes out with a new version of the iPhone every other week, so I’ve had a lot of practice with riding the bucking bronco of desire. The cycle goes like this: I read that a new one is going to come out, and then I watch the little sneak preview video they do, and then I find myself going to the store . . . just to look at them. I might as well be salivating in front of a cake counter, too.

It’s been interesting to pause and see what’s driving all of this, which is usually a feeling of deficiency. Some kind of lack. And if I pause long enough, I realize that I’ve tricked myself into believing that somehow this new phone will fill in that lack. It’s not just a phone anymore; it represents so much more.

I was invited to the Hampton Classic horse show. Mercedes Benz was a sponsor, and they had the latest fully loaded Mercedes SUV out on the field. Some guy came up to the car and said—out loud—“I gotta have this car. My life is going to rock with it!” He got in the car, banged on the steering wheel, and said, “This is mine!” He handed someone a credit card and demanded, “Get me one of these, stat.” It was amazing to see this in action, because it was the living embodiment of how we all get swept away in our own minds. There’s nothing wrong with buying or enjoying a car, if you can afford it and all that. But thinking that some object is going to make us truly satisfied and allay our feelings of lack, longing, and dissatisfaction is nothing but a fantasy.

What would it be like to be truly content with what we have? You can understand that in regard to material things, of course, but I also mean it in regard to our life in total. What would it be like to walk down the street like that? Not imagining where you’re going or where you’re coming from but being content with whatever the street, the world, has to offer at exactly that moment in time.

Dogen said it would be like this: “The mind and the externals are just thus. The gate of liberation is open.” What? Let me explain.

At the Zen center we have a few beautiful tea bowls made by a Japanese potter, all of which are chipped now, because people wash them and stack them in the metal rack, and they’re very fragile. When I talk to our community members about not putting them in the rack, they say, “They’re too delicate to use. Why do we even have them?” Suzuki Roshi had the same problem with the teacups in his own Zen center. (It must be a Zen center epidemic.) A student complained to Suzuki about the cups. He smiled and said, “You just don’t know how to handle them. You have to adjust yourself to the environment, not vice versa.”

This is what Dogen was saying, too. The gate of liberation is always open. Liberation from what? Liberation from walking around in a dream, like a zombie looking for contentment outside your immediate and precious life. If only you could actually recognize and receive what is here in front of you, rather than what you wish were here instead. Why is that so hard? I don’t know, but I do know that I certainly have a tendency to want to adjust my environment to myself, not the other way around. Instead, is it possible for us to constantly give thanks for whatever our life gives us? This is how to practice being truly content with what we have—even when it seems impossible.

One of my heroes of practicing this radical contentment is the 18th-century haiku master Issa, who is a beloved poet in Japan. He has a haiku that goes “Everything I touch / with tenderness, alas, / pricks like a bramble.” Essentially, “Everything I touch turns to shit.” He had his reasons for saying so. His mother died when he was 3, and he was raised in part by a loving grandmother, who died when he was 14. He was sent away from his home by his father and stepmother, not returning until he was 49. He then met his wife, Kiku. Their first child died in birth. Their second died as a toddler. Then a third child died, and finally, Kiku herself died. It was after their second child’s death that Issa wrote probably his most famous poem: “This world— / Is a dewdrop world, / And yet, and yet . . .”

Issa was so interested in that “and yet.” In a body of work inspired by incredible suffering and melancholy, there is also that incredible sweetness of the “and yet,” which pervades his writing. It’s a sweetness that coexists with sorrow, and it reminds us that sweetness is always available to us, if we’re willing to fully enter our life, just as it is.

♦

From Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up, by Koshin Paley Ellison © June 2019. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications.

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An individual turns to the dharma because it promises to remove the distress of life and bring about a deep reconciliation with this very impermanence. We undertake the practice of the Way because we have faith in the existence within ourselves of a potential for complete contentment, a contentment that is impossible to find in the pursuit of fame and profit. But it needs to be said over and over again, so as not to misconstrue the nature of Mahayana Buddhism, that this Way-seeking is not, in the end, simply another form of self-gratification. We hope, and expect, that following the Way will lead to a better understanding of ourselves and the rest of the world, and that we will achieve a degree of serenity and contentment. But is any kind of progress in self-betterment truly possible as long as practice is undertaken with the primarily selfish desire to improve one’s own lot? Is the goal of realization of one’s buddhanature compatible with a practice performed in the greedy expectation of one’s own future happiness while blithely ignoring the unhappiness of the rest of the world? The Mahayana Buddhist answer to this question has always been no.

The Mahayana emphasis on compassion and the exaltation of the bodhisattva as the ideal individual are based on this understanding, that any goodness one personally derives from following the dharma is a product of one’s primary aspiration to help all other beings to achieve happiness in their lives. In other words, practice is undertaken in order to help others, and the bodhisattva’s own slow progress toward final, complete enlightenment is the result of this other-directed activity. Thus to help others is to help oneself. It may also be said that to help oneself is to help others, since real, effective help is not possible as long as we ourselves are deluded and filled with greed and hatred. Therefore, the achievement of insight and understanding serves to make one capable of guiding and helping others. To wish to escape pain and trouble oneself and to ignore other creatures means that neither oneself nor others will find help. It is of the nature of things that we all progress together, and so we must seek the dharma with this in mind.

Knowing, then, that a mean, selfish aspiration is not a real Buddhist aspiration, the bodhisattva begins his compassionate career with vows to emancipate all others, even before he himself is completely emancipated. The four bodhisattva vows, which are chanted daily in Zen training centers, are a public reminder of what the individual’s training is all about:

Sentient beings are innumerable; I vow to save them.
Desires are inexhaustible; I vow to end them.
The Dharma teachings are boundless; I vow to master them.
The Buddha Way is unsurpassable; I vow to attain it.

The person who utters these vows in all sincerity is thus the Mahayana bodhisattva. It does not matter what color the robes of the monk are, what his ordination lineage is, or where he lives, for the Mahayana is a state of mind, and the bodhisattva is the person who makes these vows and means them. This vowing itself is the arousing of the thought of enlightenment. The 13th-century Japanese Buddhist priest and founder of the Soto Zen school Dogen makes this clear in Hotsu bodai shin, one of the chapters of his masterpiece Shobogenzo, when he says, “What is called arousing of the thought of enlightenment is the uttering of the vow to emancipate all living beings even while you yourself are not yet emancipated. When one arouses this thought, no matter how humble in appearance one is, one then becomes the guide of all beings.” If, as Dogen says elsewhere, a buddha is simply one whose main mission in the world is to guide all beings to the bliss of nirvana, then this vow must itself be the vow of the buddha that we already are. Buddha is boundless compassion; who else can make such a loving, selfless vow?

All the bodhisattva-mahasattvas, who undertake the practice of meditation, should cherish one thought only: “When I attain perfect wisdom, I will liberate all sentient beings in every realm of the universe.”

–The Diamond Sutra

The form of the vow indicates that the person who makes it will refuse the ultimate prize of complete enlightenment until and unless all other beings attain it first. Nor is this vow restricted only to human or even sentient beings; it includes trees, grass, shrubs, and stones as well. This is because Mahayana compassion and the bodhisattva’s vow are not directed solely toward the human realm, for if it excluded nonhuman beings, it would not be perfect compassion, it would not be unconditional. The cycle of birth and death and its suffering includes all living things, not just human life. Now obviously the number of beings to be saved is indeed vast, even innumerable, as the vow says, and because bodhisattvas are really only human beings, and limited in the way all conditioned beings are, it would seem that in reality there will never be a time when their work is finished. Thus, in making the vow, they destine themselves to be forever excluded from the ultimate goal. In life after life, in all the realms of suffering, bodhisattvas work ceaselessly to save all others while they themselves are never completely free of pain and delusion. One of the startling paradoxes of Mahayana Buddhism is that it is the bodhisattva alone—skillful, wise, and compassionate—who will never attain full, perfect buddhahood, always remaining behind while others go on.                                               

So what, after all, is a buddha? What, after all, is perfect enlightenment? Buddhists over two thousand years ago asked these same questions, and in answering them created the movement within Buddhism that we now know as Mahayana. True enlightenment, they said, is not the complete, final cutting-off of the round of rebirth and suffering and the entering of final nirvana (Skt., nirupa-dhishesha nirvana). Instead, one achieves the only real enlightenment precisely at that point when, out of compassion for the suffering of living beings, one deliberately refuses to attain the stage of final nirvana and enlightenment unless all other living beings attain it too. Thus, the paradox is that in refusing what is traditionally considered to be the ultimate goal of Buddhism and choosing to remain behind to serve as a guide, one really acquires the only true enlightenment and nirvana.

It cannot really be otherwise. If enlightenment is, among other things, complete selflessness, then only when we have rid ourselves of selfishness to the point where we are no longer greedy even for the fruits of training do we really reach the “goal” of the Way. In gladly giving up the goal, we acquire it. The arousing of the thought of enlightenment, then, which Dogen says is the compassionate vow to save all beings, is really a remarkable, wonderful occasion. It is remarkable and wonderful because the very ability to make such a vow and mean it most sincerely must be the appearance in one’s life of a selflessness and compassion that are truly buddha-like. It is, according to Dogen, the manifesting of buddhanature itself. Dogen says in the same chapter of the Shobogenzo,

In Buddhism, the ultimate attainment is Bodhi [Skt., Pali, “awakening”], which is also buddhahood. If the highest, perfect enlightenment is compared with the initial arousing of the thought of enlightenment, it is like comparing the great conflagration at the time of the world’s end with the light of a firefly. Still, if one arouses the thought of enlightenment, the thought of emancipating all other living beings even before one is emancipated oneself, there is no difference between the two. A buddha is simply a person who thinks, “How can I cause beings to enter the supreme dharma and rapidly become buddhas?” This is the life of a Tathagata.

However, even this exertion of one’s own inherent enlightenment nature in the perpetual act of helping all others to realize their enlightenment nature is not the final truth. After all, Shakyamuni did not dedicate his life simply to helping us to become completely enlightened and to escape the world of karma and rebirth. He taught us, rather, to teach others to teach others, until such time as the world is full of beings whose sole aim in life is to be of service to others. Thus, to arouse the thought of enlightenment is not just to make a determination to enlighten all beings; it is the determination to motivate all living beings to motivate all living beings, on and on. “Benefiting living beings,” says Dogen, “means causing living beings to arouse the thought of emancipating all others even before each is himself emancipated. We cannot become buddhas in any other way than through the power of causing this thought [of emancipating all others before oneself is emancipated] to arise in others.” Thus, Dogen universalizes the bodhisattva vow and the thought of enlightenment; his vision is that of a world in which all beings are motivated by this vow. It cannot be otherwise, according to him, for if any being enters the dharma for himself, and not for others, it is not the dharma and he has not entered. To practice the dharma is to “drop off mind and body,” and when mind and body have been forgotten to the extent that we are no longer selfishly motivated to acquire even the wonderful prize of enlightenment for ourselves, we have really entered the dharma, really aroused the thought of enlightenment.

♦

From How to Raise an Ox: Zen Practice as Taught in Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, by Francis Dojun Cook © 1999. Excerpted with permission of Wisdom Publications.

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