Genjokoan 13: Starting From Where We Are.


Photo by Hein Waschefort: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en


It may be that life is birds and that life is fish. And beyond this, there may still be further progress. The existence of [their] practice-and-experience, and the existence of their lifetime and their life, are like this.

 

Master Dogen continues to explore a vast view of our reality, our life, as can be realised in practicing zazen. It is manifest as a great active diversity of beings and things.


This being so, a bird or fish that aimed to move through the water or the sky [only] after getting to the bottom of water or utterly penetrating the sky, could never find its way or find its place in the water or in the sky.


Even though we can realise our life as vast and limitless, we have to start to practice right where we are in our life, with all its distractions and messiness and annoying personal issues...

 

When we find this place, this action is inevitably realized as the Universe. When we find this way, this action is inevitably the realized Universe [itself]. This way and this place are neither great nor small; they are neither subjective nor objective; neither have they existed since the past nor do they appear in the present; and so they are present like this.


Zazen practice aligns us with the reality of our lives and our place in wider existence. In 'dropping off body and mind' we drop off all ideas of self and other, time, place... and so we can experience our life very directly in the only time it can ever really happen.

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