Dogen Zen Belfast

Halloween, the old Irish festival of closeness to the dead, is a time of mirth, mystery and mischief.  Let's face it - the character of Zen in the west is quite po-faced and, well, pretty white, middle class and puritan: The mask of White Anglo-Saxon Buddhism... 😴  Sometimes we're quiet and still. Sometimes we're full of fireworks, rebellious energy and craic. Zen practice embraces and celebrates all of life, and death.   Oíche Shamhna Shona Daoibh !! 👻 

I've been studying a course called Peace and Conflict Studies which includes the topic of ethics in peacebuilding from various perspectives. A fundamental point about our deluded thinking and perceptions, a 'pivot-point' to use the sort of term that Master Dogen liked, is that our thinking mind tends to split our experience of the world into 'this' and 'that', 'good' as opposed 'bad', 'me' as opposed 'other, 'us' and 'them'... in this way, when we fall for the familiar and attractice reductive simplicities of our own polarised thinking, we lose the much broader, inclusive view of what we are. This occurs within Buddhism around the debate about 'socially engaged' Buddhism, whether Buddhists should take sides in social issues and that. As a person who works in the 'helping professions' it seems to me however that people whom are inclined towards that sort of effort just gravitate towards it naturally,...

The conclusion of Master Dogen's zazen instructions commences with the traditional view of a human life as a great endowment, as it enables us to practice Buddhism and overcome the endless cycle of death and rebirth. However, here it has a Dogen-esque twist on it as he combines this theme with the human body itself as a 'pivotal' thing in practice -- this recalls the earlier theme of zazen as the 'vigorous route of getting the body out', or our practice of realising our body as already free and living in reality via our sitting 'dropping off body and mind'. 'Sparks that fly from flint' can be seen to be thoughts, ideas, likes and dislikes while the flint, the essential thing that gives rise to sparks, is the body - our habitual state may be to be lost in thoughts and feelings not seeing the body as already free of them... We have already received the essential pivot which is the human body: we must never pass time in vain. We are maintaining and rely...

Master Dogen's instructions for zazen continue... In general, [the patriarchs] of this world and of other directions, of the Western Heavens and of the Eastern Lands, all similarly maintain the Buddha’s posture, and solely indulge in the custom of our religion. They simply devote themselves to sitting, and are caught by the still state. Master Dogen sees zazen as the thing that unifies all of Buddhism and those who practice it. Zen tradition is sometimes seen as a 'special transmission' of Buddhist truth 'outside' of the scriptures and the rest of Buddhism, but Master Dogen didn't agree with this. He saw Zen practice, especially zazen, as just the essence of Buddhism itself. When somebody sits zazen droppin off body and mind, dropping off time and place, they are sitting in the same place and time as all other practitioners who are doing the same thing. Although there are myriad distinctions and thousands of differences, we should just practice [Za]zen and pursu...

Master Dogen has just talked about how realised/ realising action happens independently of the thinking mind and perceptions - our own sitting is a manifest fact before our thoughts and perceptions of it, as are all actions in the real world. In sitting we come to realise this directly. Therefore, we do not discuss intelligence as superior and stupidity as inferior. Do not choose between clever people and dull ones. If we single-mindedly make effort [in Zazen], that truly is pursuit of the truth. Practice-and-experience is naturally untainted. Actions are more balanced and constant. Whether we have a sharp, intellectual mind (like a college professor) or the dull, slow mind of a dunce (like me!) it doesn't matter, because we drop off sharp wits and dim wits alike to realise the ascendant reality, the reality 'untainted' by thoughts and perceptions, of our sitting and all our real actions in the world. When we settle into sitting, when mind and body begin to come into harmon...