Dogen Zen Belfast

  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 ...

  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 ...

  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...

  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...