Dogen Zen Belfast

  Let me get this right out of the way first - Nishijima Roshi was not a Marxist! However, like a lot of intelligent, inquiring and philosophically-minded people of his generation (and subsequent generations, even in countries where Marx's writings were effectively banned or got you investigated or blacklisted, as in the USA), he had read Marx and was familiar with his ideas and theories. In his main work Das Kapital, Marx adapted the idealistic dialectical modality of his teacher Hegel and used it to examine and lay bare the workings and inherent material and social conflicts of the capitalist mode of production and capitalist society. Nishijima Roshi mentions this all in his intro to Shobogenzo. This is relevant to Shobogenzo as Master Dogen also presents a sort of radical dialectical view, as laid out in Shobogenzo Genjo-Koan...   Basically, he [Master Dogen] looks at a problem from two sides, and then tries to synthesize the two viewpoints into a middle way. This method h...

I'm certainly no expert, but I've read some of the old Zen texts and practiced a small bit, and what it boils down to is the movement from experiencing the world and our life in terms of our thinking to sensing, feeling or experiencing it directly. This is what the central practice of Zen, zazen, is about - 'dropping off body and mind'. It's a simple idea, but it has profound implications when we actually do it, because so much of what we generally consider our life is based on thought, on memories and values and the implied narratives that we may take to be 'me'. And much of our society and culture may be based on the erroneous acceptance of human thought as our ultimate reality ('I think therefore I am'). What we feel/ encounter/ experience when we practice dropping all that for a while is the quick of our dynamic, ungraspable life as it happens spontaneously here in the open, fleeting present moment. The seeming incompatibility between the solidit...

Here's a nice video made by one of the people who practiced with Nishijima Roshi.  Its message is very direct. Unfortunately, like many other philosophies, Buddhism has spawned a lot of religious hype, unreasonable ideation, and other such magical thinking. 'Nirvana', the Buddhist idea of being completely free of suffering, is one such idea that we might like to think offers some easy escape from our life, and unscrupulous teachers and cult leaders have preyed on this understandable human weakness - it's much more comforting to believe that I can escape from and avoid my mental suffering than to face up to it and accept it squarely as a reality of our human life. Zazen is just dropping 'good' and 'bad' and seeing and accepting things directly as they are. It's not an escape from the reality of our life, it's aligning ourselves with how it really is at this time... which is not a theory nor an idea.   

  Master Dogen ends this short chapter on the Great Matter of our life and death with a very direct statement on what it is to be a buddha:   There is a very easy way to become buddha. Not committing wrongs; being without attachment to life-and-death; showing deep compassion for all living beings, venerating those above and pitying those below; being free of the mind that dislikes the ten thousand things and free of the mind that desires them; the mind being without thought and without grief: this is called buddha. Look for nothing else.  Shobogenzo Shoji Year not recorded.   Buddhism had become an institutionalised religion by Master Dogen's time, and like many religions it provides objects of faith and veneration and worship. Master Dogen however wants to indicate how people can directly realise for themselves what the Buddha realised, and not 'look for anything else' based on erroneous views and beliefs as to what fantastical or mystical things 'buddha' might...

  Master Dogen's exploration of the Great Matter of our life and death continues:   When we are without dislike and without longing, then for the first time we enter the mind of buddha. But do not consider it with mind and do not say it with words! When we just let go of our own body and our own mind and throw them into the house of buddha, they are set into action from the side of buddha; then when we continue to obey this, without exerting any force and without expending any mind, we get free from life and death and become buddha. Who would wish to linger in mind? When we get used to sitting zazen we can directly experience the state of openness and calm after we've allowed the discriminating mind of likes and dislikes, and the thoughts and sensations of longing for things to be different than they actually are, to just come and go. This is the state of buddha in our own practice and experience, and this effortlessness will carry over into the rest of our life if we pr...

Our preferred answer is probably 'no', but the honest answer is that Buddhists have been as prone to discriminatory ideation as anybody else. This may all be stating the obvious, but it seems at the present time of ideological degeneracy in the political and social discourse of the western world that we maybe should be stating and restating some obvious things on an ongoing basis. The main mental or conceptual component to discrimination against any group is often what's called 'generalisation'. That's where we, in our own heads with our own mental processes, ascribe negative qualities to a whole group of people based on one or two incidents chosen selectively, or on other unsustainable evidence - so a whole group, in our thinking, becomes less intelligent, lazy, dangerous, prone to criminality... and so this conditions how we see that whole group. It need hardly be said that this is clearly a form of mental/emotional delusion. In Buddhist practice we 'drop ...