Myswizard

Dogen (1200-1253)

There is a simple way to become a buddha When you refrain from unwholesome actions, are not attached to birth and death, and are compassionate to all sentient beings…not excluding or desiring anything…you will be called a buddha. Do not seek anything else. (from Moon in a Dewdrop edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi)
So wrote Eihei Dogen, one of Zen Buddhism’s most prominent figures.

He was born in 1200 near Kyoto which was, at that time, the capital of Japan. When he was fourteen he was formally ordained as a monk and entered a monastery at the foot of Mt Hiei to begin his training. In 1217 he moved to Kennin Monastery - also in Kyoto - and studied there until 1223. He then accompanied his abbot, Myozen, to China. The purpose of this journey was to engage more fully with Ch’an Buddhism, the Chinese precursor of Japanese Zen.

Dropping Away Body and Mind

His experience of the Chinese monasteries was ultimately disappointing. He felt that the practice of koans, for example, which was a key feature of many of these monasteries, was narrow and limiting. After two years, he contemplated returning to Japan. But a crucial meeting with a renowned priest, Rujung, changed his mind. Rujung taught that practice was all about ‘dropping away body and mind’ and emphasized sitting meditation, rather than, koans, chanting or rituals.

Having studied under Rujung, in 1227 Dogen returned to Japan and began to expound his new understanding through his writing. Indeed, Dogen was a prolific writer and his writings are available in translation. In 1233 he also opened Kannondori Temple in Fukakusa and appointed Ejo has head monk. In 1243 the monastery was relocated to Echizen Province northeast of Kyoto and was renamed Daibutsu Monastery and subsequently, in 1246, renamed again as Eihei-Ji Monastery.

In 1252, however, Dogen became ill and in 1253 he died in Kyoto.

More on Dogen
Great Awakenings

Dogen’s teaching, as expounded through his writing, encourages the practice of a type of meditation known as zazen or ‘just-sitting’. He explains, ‘Zazen is not thinking of good, not thinking of bad. It is not conscious endeavor….Do not desire to become a buddha’.

In ‘Eight Awakenings of Great Beings’ Dogen focuses on the practices that lead to Nirvana. These are 1. to have few desires 2. knowing how much is enough 3. serenity (to be found in seclusion) 4. diligent effort 5. mindfulness 6. practicing meditation 7. cultivating wisdom 8. avoiding ‘hollow’ discussions. He wrote: ‘We can learn and practice these awakenings because of the merit of our wholesome conditions from the past. By practicing and nurturing these awakenings you can certainly arrive at unsurpassable enlightenment’.(from Enlightenment Unfolds edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi)

DOGEN ZENJI

After training for nine years under the Rinzai teacher Myozen, Dogen Zenji made the difficult journey to China, where he studied with and became the Dharma successor (14th Patriarch in lineage to Dong Shan Liang Chieh (Tozan)); 24th in lineage in Transmission of the Light to Master Tendo Nyojo (Ju-Ching, 13th Patriarch) in the Soto Zen lineage. Considered the founder of the Japanese Soto School, Dogen Zenji established Eiheiji, the principal Soto training monastery, and is best known for his collection of Dharma essays, Shobogenzo.

Dogen was the founder of the Soto (T’sao Dong Ch’an) Lineage of Buddhism in Japan. He came from a noble family, but his life was unhappy and difficult, because his parents died when he was a very young boy. Their deaths lead him to contemplate the impermanence of life, and at the age of thirteen, he became a Buddhist monk.

Dogen didn’t realize the truth of Zen for a long time. The difficulty of Zen meditation is not the training, but the letting go of preconceived ideas. The experience of the true self is a state of awareness that cannot be defined; words cannot express living reality. In the experience of the true self, there is no “I” no reference point whatsoever.

Dogen was troubled by one particular question: if all human beings are born with Buddha Nature, why is it so difficult to realize it? Dogen finally studied with Eisai, a Rinzai master, who told him it was a delusion to think in such dualistic terms as Buddha. With this answer Dogen experienced Satori. Eisai lived for a few more months; Dogen became his disciple and stayed with him. After Eisai’s death, Dogen remained with Myozen, Eisai’s successor, for eight years, and received the seal of a master.

Despite his profound insights, Dogen felt he didn’t have complete understanding, and therefore, went with Myozen to China to study more. He practiced Chinese Zen (Ch’an) with Master Ju-Ching in China, but mistakenly sat in a quietest way, which merely lead to notional emptiness condemned by H.H. The Sixth Patriarch Hui Neng. One day Master Ju-Ching was scolding another monk for sleeping, and said, “The practice of Zazen (Sitting Meditation) is the dropping away of body and mind. What do you think dozing will accomplish?” Upon hearing these words, Dogen became fully Enlightened. He suddenly understood that Zazen is not just sitting still, but it is the “I” opening up to its own Reality. When preconceived ideas are abandoned, one experience the true nature of mind; life is experienced directly, non-dualistically, without ego interfering. He made the following comments about his experience:

“Mind and body dropped off; dropped off mind and body! This state should be experienced by everyone; it is like piling fruit into a basket without a bottom, like pouring water into a bowl with a pierced hole; however much you may pile or pour you cannot fill it up. When this is realized the pail bottom is broken through. But while there is still a trace of conceptualism which makes you say ‘I have this understanding’ or ‘I have that realization’, you are still playing with unrealities.”

Four years later, when Dogen returned to Japan, he said, “I have come back empty-handed. I have realized only that the eyes are horizontal and the nose is vertical.” From this empty clarity came the great Soto sect of Japan. Dogen taught a way of sitting called Shikantaza, “shikan” means nothing but, “ta” means to hit, “za” means to sit. Shikantaza has remained the basis of Soto Zen up to the present; it unites the means can end of sitting meditation. There is no means to an end, because the end is now. The act of sitting itself is the actualization of Buddha Nature or Being. The meditation does not strive for Satori, but has faith on the teacher and teachings, and trusts that realization will come as a result of sitting practice. Dogen gave the following meditation instructions:

In doing Zazen it is desirable to have a quiet room. You should be temperate in eating and drinking, forsaking all delusive relationships. Setting everything aside, think of neither good nor evil, right nor wrong. Thus, having stopped the various functions of your mind, give up even the idea of becoming a Buddha. This holds true not only for zazen but for all your daily actions.

Usually a thick square mat is put on the floor where you sit and a round cushion on top of that. You may sit in either the full or half lotus position. In the former first put your right foot on your left thigh and then your left foot on your right thigh. In the latter, only put your left foot on your right thigh. Your clothing should be worn loosely but neatly. Nest, put your right hand on your left foot and your left palm on the right palm, the tips of the thumbs lightly touching. Sit upright, leaning to neither left nor right, front nor back. Your ears should be on the same plane your shoulders and your nose in line with your navel. Your tongue should be placed against the roof of your mouth and your lips and teeth closed firmly. With your eyes kept continuously open, breathe quietly through your nostrils. Finally, having regulated your body and mind in this way, take a deep breath, sway your body to left and right, then sit firmly as a rock. Think of non-thinking. How is this done? By thinking beyond non-thinking and thinking. This is the very basis of Zazen.

Zazen is not a ’step-by-step’ meditation. Rather it is simply the easy and pleasant practice of a Buddha, the realization of the Buddha’s wisdom. The truth appears, there being no delusion. If you understand this you are completely free, supreme law will then appear of itself, and you will be free of weariness and confusion. At the completion of Zazen move your body slowly and stand up calmly. Do not move violently.”

In this meditation posture, the full lotus position provides a wide, solid physical base; both knees touch the mat to provide body stability. The rock-like, immobile body posture calms down the mind and brings tranquillity. Meditators are given a breathing technique to focus the mind. Beginners count the inbreaths and outbreaths, the count goes from one to ten, and then starts all over again. In this technique, the mind has nothing to feed on, play with, analyze, or hold on to. Thoughts will naturally come and go, and Dogen’s advice was to place each thought in the palm of your hand. In the more advanced Shikantaza, the counting of breaths is left behind, and the tamed mind abides in effortless concentrated awareness. The awareness is the unmoving center of all movement: “Abandoning thinking and doing, is nothing other than every form of doing and acting,” Dogen said.

Dogen’s Soto school taught that sitting in Zazen was entering the flow of each moment by dropping from the mind the concepts of past, present, and future. Life is one and its flow of movements and events should not be held to or dominated to create illusions of permanence. All moments and all actions, whether they are important, insignificant, fascinating, or boring. — are seen as the actual realization of Buddhahood. The Soto school’s Shikantaza helps one realize this moment now. In the Shobogenzo, Dogen said that it was useless to fix one’s hopes on a goal.

“When a fish swims, it swims on and on, and there is no end to the water. When a bird flies, it flies on and on, and there is no end to the sky. There was never a fish that swam out of the water or a bird that flew out of the sky. When they need just a little water or sky, they use just a little; when they need a lot, they use a lot. Thus, they use all of it in every moment, and in every place they have perfect freedom.

Yet if there were a bird that first wanted to examine the size of the sky, or a fish that first wanted to examine the extent of the water, and then tried to fly or swim, it would never find its way. When we find where we are at this moment, then practice follows, and this is the realization of the truth. For the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither self nor other. It has never existed before, and it is not coming into existence now. It simply is as it is.”

Dogen’s Reflecting Pool
Explaining the path to Enlightenment is the mission of every Buddhist teacher since the time of the historical Buddha. From the San-lun school, to the teaching of Dogen Zenji, great thinkers attempt to relate their understanding of the Two-fold Truth and illuminate the most efficient path to Enlightenment. Dogen, the eminent Soto Zen philosopher, takes the general understanding of the twofold truth:
The existence of a discursive, dual world of form.

A world of non-dual emptiness and sheds new light on the relationship between form and emptiness. He proposes that emptiness is manifested through the acceptance of distinctions and the discursive world. For Dogen, distinctions illuminate the fundamental emptiness. When one understands that one lives in a discursive world, then one can feel the basic emptiness. Awakening to the realization that the ultimate underlies and encompasses everything–being and non-being, delusion and Enlightenment–allows one to truly see the distinctions and to accept reality as it is. Once this understanding is reached, one experiences the compassion that flows from the pervasive emptiness. The following passage from Dogen’s “Genjokoan” fascicle of his major work, the Shobogenzo, expresses this understanding in a succinct manner:

When all dharmas are the Buddha Dharma, there is illusion and Enlightenment, practice, birth, death, buddhas, and sentient beings. When myriad dharmas are without self, there is no illusion or Enlightenment, no buddhas or sentient beings, no generation or extinction. The Buddha Way is originally beyond fullness and lack and for this reason there is generation and extinction, illusion and Enlightenment, sentient beings and buddhas. In spite of this, flowers fall always amid our grudging, and weeds flourish in our chagrin.1
The traditional Mahayana belief of the twofold truth, one that Dogen does not refute but uses as a stepping stone into his theory, states that there exists a world of form AND a world of emptiness.2 The world of form is based on discursive, dualistic thinking that explains conventional truth and understanding. The world of emptiness contains the highest truth, the belief in interdependence and no fixed reality, based in non-dual awareness and thinking. Ultimately, the world of form is empty. Residing in non-dual awareness, one realizes that all form is constantly changing. Since all things have this impermanent characteristic, then everything possesses the same essence and is one.3 This understanding places a follower in the world of emptiness and highest reality. In this realization, “all dharmas are without self, there is no illusion or Enlightenment, no buddhas or sentient being, no generation or extinction.” 4 All form is the same and empty, with no fixed reality.

Often one becomes attached to form and cannot realize the ultimate reality of emptiness. One loathes to see a flower wilt because one is attached to the idea that the flower should be beautiful and eternal. One separates the flower from the ultimate reality of impermanence and interconnectedness. This separation and attachment to “what ought to be,” causes suffering and blindness to the true reality. The reality is that the flower, like all else, grows and dies.

The beautiful mountains are praised a great deal for their remarkable appearance, but they are actually created from the shifting of the earth.

A nice vase is still breakable.
In the same vein, as british author William Somerset Maugham writes in The Razor’s Edge in conversation with the novel’s main character Larry Darrell in search of the Truth as Darrell says:

“It may be that there is no solution or it may be that I’m not clever enough to find it. Ramakrishna looked upon the world as the sport of God. “It is like a game,” he said. “In this game there are joy and sorrow, virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil., The game cannot continue if sin and suffering are altogether eliminated from the creation.” I would reject that with all my strength. The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth’s crust. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it with a beautiful design, stain it a ravishing colour, and give it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can’t make it anything but fragile. If you drop it on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn’t it possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil?” (source)

Dogen does not deny this fact, but he takes it one step further and attempts to frame distinctions not as hindrances, but as paths and indications of an underlying emptiness to everything. The realization of emptiness occurs when one who has felt this sense of oneness separates from that feeling and enters a world of dichotomies and attachments.5 Only by looking through these “attachment-colored” eyeglasses, one understands the emptiness that encompasses and extends beyond all distinctions. Distinctions must exist to make emptiness apparent. Emptiness and duality are contingent upon one another. They are the same things.

A tree and a leaf are one; that is, they depend on and define one another. A leaf exists because a tree exists and vice versa. To the non-dual mind and to themselves, the tree and the leaf transcend distinction. As autumn approaches, the leaf begins to quiver, darken and eventually falls to the ground, separating from the tree. This detachment resembles entering the dual world where the tree and leaf exist as two separate entities, no longer defining one another. According to Dogen, precisely at this moment when the distinctions are realized, the tree and leaf understand the pervasive emptiness that encompasses them both. Only by falling into the realm of duality can they feel the sense of oneness they once manifested. The leaf does not fear the world of distinctions because it falls into the net of oneness that catches and sustains all things. In the Shape of the Universe the dichotomies of the tree, leaf and all entities, illuminate the underlying and consuming emptiness that engulfs all form.

Dogen believes that all illuminating distinctions depend on two facets, such as light and dark, being and non-being, and trees and leaves. The underlying emptiness that absorbs all dichotomies makes possible the realization of these distinctions. As Dogen writes, “The Buddha Way is originally beyond fullness and lack, and for this reason there is generation and extinction, illusion and Enlightenment, sentient beings and buddhas.”6 These distinctions must be understood and accepted in the light of the idea that they are all one. Only through truly seeing and embracing the dual nature of all, can one feel and experience the sense of a fundamental ultimate. As Shunryu Suzuki explains, “each existence depends on something else. Strictly speaking, there are no separate individual existences. There are just many names for one existence.”7 The leaf “recognizes” its oneness with the tree through its attachment to the past non-duality and belief that this sense encompasses all. One may believe that diversity obstructs the recognition of emptiness, but Dogen teaches that ignoring the dual differences leads to one-sided understanding based on the attachment to a firm existence.8 Suzuki, clarifying this teaching, says, “oneness and variety, like Dark Luminosity, are the same thing, so oneness should be appreciated in each existence. We should find the reality in each moment, and in each phenomenon.”9 The acceptance of distinctions and of the underlying emptiness found in each moment and all things, constitutes the actualization of the ultimate reality. One can only realize non-attachment though attachment to worldly distinctions.10

Recognizing the pervasive emptiness through the attachments constitutes Dogen’s idea of Awakening. This underlying emptiness liberates the practitioner and allows one to see things as they are–to see the dual facets of all things in the discursive world. Awakening culminates in wanting “to know things as they are. If we know things as they are, there is nothing to point at; there is no way to grasp anything; there is no thing to grasp.”11 Knowing things as they are entails observing the different sides of an entity and realizing the facets are fundamentally rooted in emptiness. One awakens to different sides of the same reality. Like the moon reflecting in a pool of water, one must see the whole reflection and realize that another side exists, a side not reflecting. This recognition of a dark side of the moon, completely illuminates the object and one knows it fully. In the Buddha way, understanding the dual sides of all things awakens one to the complete reality of the entity and the deeper, ultimate reality of emptiness.

The Awakening to the true reality of an object through realizing the underlying emptiness, liberates one from denying human reality. As Dogen says, even though one understands that the Buddha Way encompasses all distinctions, “flowers fall always amid our grudging, and weeds flourish in our chagrin.”12 One still prefers flowers instead of weeds, which is human reality. Suppressing this urge will create further suffering and perpetuate the distinction between flowers and weeds. Suzuki writes, “that we are attached to some beauty is itself Buddha’s activity. That we do not care for weeds is also Buddha’s activity. If you know that, it is all right to attach to something. If it is Buddha’s attachment, that is non-attachment.”13 Buddha’s attachment realizes that emptiness underlies all desires and all distinctions are ultimately the same. Love is hate and hate is love. One exists if and only if the other exists. One can dislike the weeds because the feelings are ultimately the same as love for the flower. Attempting to transcend distinctions between dislike and like, or create a superficial unity, promotes further suffering because one is caught in the idea of what one believes is unity and ignores the fundamental emptiness encompassing both passion and disgust.14 This awakening to the perpetuation of suffering liberates one from fighting against human reality and, through the recognition of distinctions, one understands the ultimate.

From acceptance of things as they are and basic emptiness, compassion, called Karuna, the Golden Purifier in the texts, arises.15 Compassion comes as a feeling with reality, flowing from the underlying emptiness. Accepting things as they are, with the form of distinctions, is a feeling that comes through the ultimate emptiness. One embraces hate and love because they are ultimately the same. One generates a sense of compassion for all weeds and flowers because these distinctions manifest emptiness. All beings command compassion because their dual natures illuminate the ultimate. One cannot emphasize a “oneness” because the Buddha Way is infinite and beyond even a sense of one. Compassion, like the Buddha doctrine of emptiness, encompasses every entity and transcends even a point of “oneness.” Compassion and distinctions derive their definition and form from the pervasive, fundamental emptiness.

Dogen teaches that compassion, Enlightenment and deeper understanding of the twofold truth stem from realizing the pervasive emptiness that encompasses all distinctions and dichotomies. The acceptance and awareness of the true, interdependent world of dualities illuminates the ultimate. One can realize the true nature of the discursive world because of the infinite emptiness that sustains and embraces all duality. Dogen’s idea of emptiness acts as reflecting pool that envelopes and creates the reflection. Without the pool, there would be no reflection. Without duality, the ultimate remains hidden.

Portions of this article contain excerpts from the Wanderling.
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