Dogen Zen Belfast

Image by Roger McLassus:  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en Master Dogen turns to the nature of realisation, and its implications for those who practice it: A person getting realization is like the moon being reflected in water: the moon does not get wet, and the water is not broken. In Zen tradition, the full moon is a symbol of realisation. Because practice-realisation is just directly realising the self as it is, it doesn't hinder itself nor alter its original nature. Though the light [of the moon] is wide and great, it is reflected in a foot or an inch of water. The whole moon and the whole sky are reflected in a dew-drop on a blade of grass and are reflected in a single drop of water. Realization does not break the individual, just as the moon does not pierce the water. The individual does not hinder the state of realization, just as a dew-drop does not hinder the sky and moon. We can practice and realise that we are part of reality regardless of our circu...

Master Dogen turns suddenly from clarifying the nature of Buddhist practice to discussing causality, and life and death: Firewood becomes ash; it can never go back to being firewood. Nevertheless, we should not take the view that ash is its future and firewood is its past. Remember, firewood abides in the place of firewood in the Dharma. It has a past and it has a future. Although it has a past and a future, the past and the future are cut off. Ash exists in the place of ash in the Dharma. It has a past and it has a future. The firewood, after becoming ash, does not again become firewood. A person who has practiced realisation is not the same person afterwards. Things are just what they are in the present moment - in Buddhist action/practice a person is not defined by their remembered past or an imagined future. Past and future are dropped off and we can act free of them. We do however have a real past and future (not one based on ideas, remembering, or imagining a future), but they ar...

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...

  [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...

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. ...

  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...

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...

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') ...

 [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...

  [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 the first two phases of Master Dogen's contextualisation of what Buddhist practice is all about he presented two views of how people have generally looked at and interpreted the self and the world - a view based on ideas, ideals and thinking (idealism), and a view based in the senses, the body and the material world devoid of values ascribed by the mind (m...

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. 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. 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. And though it is like this, it is only that flowers, while loved, fall; and weeds while hated, flourish.   In these readings of Shobogenzo I'll be using the Nishijima/ Cross translation of the text, which is available in full (four volumes) in PDF format via the 'links' section in the menu. This chapter, Genjokoan, is considered very important as its opening section is seen as offering an essential insight into how Master Dogen looks at things from different viewpoints in...

Hello, I'm Harry, a student of Zen Buddhism with my teachers the late Gudo Nishijima Roshi and Peter Rocca Sensei. I live and work a lay person's life in Belfast. On this blog I'll be reading and reflecting upon Shobogenzo, the masterwork of Zen Master Eihei Dogen, the 13th century philosopher-monk and founder of Soto Zen Buddhism in Japan. Shobogenzo ('True Dharma Eye Treasury") is an ambitious literary expression of Master Dogen's zazen practice as he brings his 'Dharma eye' to bear on such things as Buddhist teachings, Zen koans, the central practice of zazen, and essential themes including time and life/death and what it is to exist in this dance of coming and going, realisation and delusion, and also what it is to experience in our practice of zazen that which we are prior to the dance of words or ideas or any opposing, conditioned things at all. Master Dogen, besides being a gifted philosopher, was a poet who dared to attempt to express what many ...