Genjokoan 7: No-Self, or Non-Self?

 

[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 contextualising the nature of that 'learning' and that 'self' by looking at it from various perspectives, his 'three philosophies, one reality' as Nishijima Roshi observed:


1. The view of thinking/philosophy/ideas: Self, as in 'learning ourselves'.

2. The view without thinking or ideas: No-self, or 'forgetting the self'.

3. The view of action or Buddhist practice: Non-self, or self arising and departing from moment to moment as the 'myriad dharmas' in 'dropping off body and mind'.

4. Reality itself: The non-self and the world becoming harmonised and in unison in their mutual 'falling away'.


At some point in our practice, and it's not a very esoteric or difficult thing to see, we can recognise that there is no 'self' to accumulate realisation. So 'forgotten realisation' is the dropping off of even the aspiration to realise no-self or non-self, or any other goal or designation we can imagine.

It's strange, for there is someone who really acts, who practices 'dropping off body and mind' to realise the nature of self and our reality, but they are completely ungraspable, or 'ineffable' as Nishijima Roshi used to say.

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