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Genjokoan 8: Our Selfless Element.

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When people first seek the Dharma, we are far removed from the borders of Dharma. [But] as soon as the Dharma is authentically transmitted to us, we are a human being in [our] original element. When a man is sailing along in a boat and he moves his eyes to the shore, he misapprehends that the shore is moving. If he keeps his eyes fixed on the boat, he knows that it is the boat which is moving forward. Similarly, when we try to understand the myriad dharmas on the basis of confused assumptions about body and mind, we misapprehend that our own mind or our own essence may be permanent. If we become familiar with action and come back to this concrete place, the truth is evident that the myriad dharmas are not self. Master Dogen continues to make some very direct and practical statements about Buddhist practice, and how we approach it:  When people first seek the Dharma, we are far removed from the borders of Dharma. [But] as soon as the Dharma is authentically transmitted to us, we are...
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Genjokoan 7: No-Self, or Non-Self?

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  [1]To learn the Buddha’s truth is to learn ourselves. [2]To learn ourselves is to forget ourselves. [3]To forget ourselves is to be experienced by the myriad dharmas. [4]To be experienced by the myriad dharmas is to let our own body-and-mind, and the body-and-mind of the external world, fall away. There is a state in which the traces of realization are forgotten; and it manifests the traces of forgotten realization for a long, long time. Anatman (Sanskrit), or no-self, is an important doctrine from early Buddhism. It states that there is no abiding self or soul to be found, and that attachment to the idea of, and sense of, an enduring self is the source of dukkha or suffering. The point of Buddhism is to end that suffering by realising the nature of 'self' as hollow, insubstantial. It may seem strange then that Master Dogen appears to affirm a 'self' in his assertion that 'to learn the Buddha's truth is to learn ourselves', but again he's contextualisi...
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Genjokoan 6: Studying the Limitless Self.

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To learn the Buddha’s truth is to learn ourselves. To learn ourselves is to forget ourselves. To forget ourselves is to be experienced by the myriad dharmas. To be experienced by the myriad dharmas is to let our own body-and-mind, and the body-and-mind of the external world, fall away. There is a state in which the traces of realization are forgotten; and it manifests the traces of forgotten realization for a long, long time. Master Dogen continues Genjokoan with some more very direct statements regarding Buddhist practice-realisation. Here he turns the reader's attention to the area of self, and its centrality to Zen practice. On hearing Buddhist ideas like buddha-nature or the Zen koan 'show me your original face before your mother and father were born' we might think that our true self, our true nature, is something hidden and difficult to access in ourselves. Actually, the realised self in Buddhism is very directly realised and manifest, and it's not hidden at all. ...
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Genjokoan 5: Whole Mind-Body Perceptions.

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  When we use the whole body-and-mind to look at forms, and when we use the whole body-and-mind to listen to sounds, even though we are sensing them directly, it is not like a mirror’s reflection of an image, and not like water and the moon. While we are experiencing one side, we are blind to the other side. Master Dogen continues on a series of very direct statements about the nature of Buddhist practice-realisation. In sitting zazen, when our habitual 'this'-as-opposed-'that' thinking activity quietens down and our mind and body settle into balanced unison, we experience a state where what we generally experience and designate as inside of ourselves (thoughts and feelings) and what we generally consider outside of ourselves (perceptions of objects, sights and sounds) flow together free of our thoughts and designations/names for things. Our perceptions are no longer one-sided, like looking at an image or a reflection, because we're not mentally conceiving an observ...
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Genjokoan 4: What Buddhas Do (not Woo-Woo).

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Driving ourselves to practice and experience the myriad dharmas is delusion. When the myriad dharmas actively practice and experience ourselves, that is the state of realization. Those who greatly realize delusion are buddhas. Those who are greatly deluded about realization are ordinary beings. There are people who further attain realization on the basis of realization. There are people who increase their delusion in the midst of delusion. When buddhas are really buddhas, they do not need to recognize themselves as buddhas. Nevertheless, they are buddhas in the state of experience, and they go on experiencing the state of buddha.  After contextualising the general nature of Buddhist practice by employing a fourfold scheme of viewpoints, Master Dogen continues Genjokoan with some remarkably direct statements about the actual practice-realisation of the state of buddhahood: Driving ourselves to practice and experience the myriad dharmas is delusion. When the myriad dharmas actively p...
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Genjokoan: The Three Philosophies and the 'Nonthinking' Koan.

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Master Dogen laid out three viewpoints, or 'three philosophies' as Nishijima Roshi descibed them, at the start of Genjokoan: thinking/ ideas, an absence of ideas, and the phase of Buddhist practice that transcends both an 'abundance' of ideas and a 'lack' of ideas, thoughts and values. This chimes nicely with an important koan that Master Dogen cites in his zazen instructions, Fukanzazengi. He discusses this koan in more detail in the chapter of Shobogenzo called Zazenshin: Once, when the Great Master Hongdao of Yueshan was sitting [in meditation], a monk asked him, "What are you thinking of, [sitting there] so fixedly?" The master answered, "I'm thinking of not thinking." The monk asked, "How do you think of not thinking?" The Master answered, "Nonthinking." This koan presents three modes in relation to thinking: 1. Thinking 2. Not thinking, and 3. Nonthinking (sometimes translated as 'different to thinking') ...
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Genjokoan 3: Our Feet on the Ground with the Flowers and Weeds (4: Reality).

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 [1] When all dharmas are [seen as] the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and there is death, there are buddhas and there are ordinary beings. [2] When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death. [3] The Buddha’s truth is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, and so there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are beings and buddhas. [4] And though it is like this, it is only that flowers, while loved, fall; and weeds while hated, flourish. In this important opening section of Genjokoan, Master Dogen has contextualised the nature of Buddhism by situating it after two other fundamental views of things. This is what Nishijima Roshi called the 'three philosophies' - [1] a view based on thoughts/ philosophies and the mind [2] a view based on the absence of thoughts and values, or a materialist vi...
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