Genjokoan 8: Our Selfless Element.


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 a human being in [our] original element.


When we're first approaching Buddhism we might, naturally enough, be full of curiosity and might want to 'get' it intellectually as we would other subjects. But Master Dogen indicates that learning about Buddhism is really about action, or practicing it, which entails 'dropping off body and mind' in zazen.

Elsewhere he refers to zazen as the authentic and full transmission of Buddhism, and in Fukanzazengi he explains how in practicing zazen we return to our 'original element': "...If you grasp the point, you are like a dragon gaining the water, like a tiger taking to the mountains."


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.


Looking around us, it might seem like we ourselves are a constant in an ever-changing, moving world - a still point, like the man sitting on the boat assuming the shore is moving when in fact the boat he's on is the thing that's moving.

In zazen however, from the very beginning, we can't find anything permanent in what arises, be it thoughts and feelings or objects in what we generally consider to be the 'outside' world. 

In zazen we can notice that we have no enduring self and that even our awareness, which we may presume to be a sort of underlying essence, actually arises from moment-to-moment dependent upon other transitory things - the many objects of awareness or 'the myriad dharmas'.

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