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Shobogenzo Shoji 5: And the Meaning of Life Is...

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  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...
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Are Buddhists Racist and Sexist?

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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 ...
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Shobogenzo Shoji 4: The Radical Middle Way.

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  Master Dogen's exploration of the Great Matter of our real life and death continues...    This life-and-death is just the sacred life of buddha. If we hate it and want to get rid of it, that is just wanting to lose the sacred life of buddha. If we stick in it, if we attach to life-and-death, this also is to lose the sacred life of buddha. We confine ourselves to the condition of buddha.   Again, some schools of Buddhism and other philosophies saw this, our life-and-death, as something to be overcome, to be transcended for a higher spiritual reality and such. Master Dogen again emphasizes that this life is where it's at - this is the only place and time we will ever clarify the nature of our life-death. At the same time, we don't attach to life-death. 'Buddha' is not a fixed state or principle or psychological 'zone' or some sort of place we eventually arrive at. This is what we clarify in 'dropping off body and mind' in zazen and in the rest of ...
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Shobogenzo Shoji 3: Fearless in the Fear of Death, and/or Life.

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  Shobogenzo Shoji continues to examine the Great Matter of our life and death...    To understand that we move from birth to death is a mistake.   Our conventional view of time is that we move in a line from past into present into future, based on our thinking/imagining. The view of Buddhist practice, of zazen, is different though: when we have stopped the mental activity of remembering a past, thinking about the present, and imagining a future then what happens to time? The implied linear nature of it doesn't hold up. The sense that there is a self that exists on this imaginary timeline from a remembered past through to a dimly imagined death doesn't seem so fixed and certain at all.   Birth is a state at one moment; it already has a past and will have a future. For this reason, it is said in the Buddha-Dharma that appearance is just non-appearance.  Extinction also is a state at one moment; it too has a past and a future. This is why it is said th...
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Shobogenzo Shoji 2: Getting Over Life & Death.

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  Shobogenzo Shoji ('Life and Death') begins:  Because in life-and-death there is buddha, there is no life and death. Again, we can say: Because in life-and-death there is no “buddha,” we are not deluded in life-and-death. [This] meaning was expressed by Kassan and Jozan. [These] are the words of the two Zen Masters; they are the words of people who had got the truth, and so they were decidedly not laid down in vain. Master Dogen employs his version of the words of previous Zen masters here. The first statement affirms the state of 'buddha', and the second negates the concept 'buddha'... he often does this when looking at a subject - he both affirms it and negates it as a concept. To the logical western mind it looks like a contradiction... something 'is' and 'is not' at the same time? That's not cricket! We can say there is buddha, but it's not a static thing nor a thing nor an idea we 'get'. It's a manifest but dynamic s...
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Shobogenzo Shoji: The Reality of Our Life and Death.

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'Shoji' means 'life and death' but, in the Buddhist sense, it also suggests samsara, the realm of constant birth and death and rebirth that foundational Buddhism saw as being the cyclical existence of suffering from which it sought to provide escape. Many Zen teachers have expressed the centrality in Zen practice of 'the great matter of life and death', and in this short, pithy chapter of Shobogenzo Master Dogen addresses the theme quite directly. Generally speaking, Zen Buddhism doesn't claim to know exactly what happens to us at death nor after death. Rather, in keeping with Buddhist doctrines with regards to 'no-self' (anatman) it radically reframes the question of our death by indicating directly that there is no self born in the first place that can die... In Zen this is not a doctrinal truth or belief but a direct mind-body seeing into the nature of our existence: In zazen, when we 'drop body and mind' allowing thoughts and feeling to c...
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Shobogenzo Maka-hannya-haramitsu 4: Space Hanging in Space.

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  Master Dogen has been exploring the image of prajna, direct intuitive knowledge of our reality, as space: This refers to the practice of zazen as we can experience it ourselves when we sit down and allow all thoughts of 'inside' as opposed 'outside', 'self' as opposed 'other' to drop away. Our thinking clarifies and clears and we are in an open, unhindered state not chopped up and dominated by our usual thinking activities. The chapter continues with this short verse about it from Master Dogen's own teacher, Master Tendo Nyojo, where he likens himself in practicing zazen to a wind chime:   My late Master, the eternal Buddha, says:    Whole body like a mouth, hanging in space; Not asking if the wind is east, west, south, or north, For all others equally, it chatters prajna:  Chin Ten Ton Ryan Chin Ten Ton.      This is the chattering of prajna [transmitted] by Buddhist patriarchs from rightful successor to rightful successor. It is prajna as the ...
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