Genjokoan 16: Ripening the Milky Way.


To conclude Genjokoan, Master Dogen provides a short commentary on Master Hotetsu's response in the fan koan story. He says that direct action-realisation like this is the authentic transmission of the Buddha-Dharma...


The real experience of the Buddha-Dharma, the vigorous road of the authentic transmission, is like this. Someone who says that because [the air] is ever-present we need not use a fan, or that even when we do not use [a fan] we can still feel the air, does not know ever-presence, and does not know the nature of air. Because the nature of air is to be ever-present, the behavior of Buddhists has made the Earth manifest itself as gold and has ripened the Long River into curds and whey. 


Master Dogen is generally very straightforward, grounded and direct, but he also acknowledges that there is a mysterious mutuality to Buddhist practice whereby our own practice effects broader reality. He ends Genjokoan with a vast, cosmic vision of Buddhist practice ripening and rendering 'the Long River', which is the old Chinese name for our galaxy, The Milky Way.

 

Shobogenzo Genjo-koan This was written in mid-autumn in the 1st year of Tenpuku, and was presented to the lay disciple Yo Koshu of Chinzei. Edited in [the 4th] year of Kencho.


As was mentioned at the beginning of this short reading of Genjokoan, the text was written for a lay student of Master Dogen's, in 1233 by the western calendar, and this has been a reading by a lay practitioner hundreds of years later. I think the text is still as direct and insightful today as it was when it must have first astonished Yo Koshu of Chinzei all those centuries ago.

On the off-chance that this short exercise has been of any use to anyone else I should do this:


We dedicate the merit of this practice to all beings: May all be happy. May all be well. May all enjoy great awakening.

May we realise great awakening together with all things and all beings everywhere.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Master Dogen's Shobogenzo: A Layman's Reading

Image
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 ...
Read more

Genjokoan 1: Three Philosophies, One Reality (views 1 and 2).

Image
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...
Read more

Genjokoan: The Three Philosophies and the 'Nonthinking' Koan.

Image
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') ...
Read more