Just a short interlude from reading Shobogenzo Bussho to look at Guttersnipe Zen. Zen, due to various cultural and social factors, has become associated in the west with a certain societal milieu, with an alternative philosophy scene, and post-60s new age ideas, and yoga, and ideas around 'oriental' transcendentalism, therapy, self-help and all that. It's quite middle class, tame and dreadfully mannerly, what what... Consider though the case of Kodo Sawaki Roshi. He was born into a wealthy family but his parents died, so he ended up living with an abusive relative who ran a gambling den in the seedy part of town where sex workers and pimps plied their trades. He lived off his wits and his fists, was a street kid, a guttersnipe, before he found his way into the Zen monastic life. It's said he had his first deep experience of impermanence when, aged 9, he witnessed the corpse of a neighbour who had died while shagging a young sex worker. Even after wearing the robe he was...
When we say something like 'oneness with the Universe' we might think of it as some transcendent state, or a head-trippy multicoloured experience with stars and rainbows, but actually it's already an everyday fact that we are a part of the Universe, every part of us, even the thoughts in our head to the contrary of this fact that chop our experience up into 'me' as opposed 'that' when we mistake them for broader reality. After a while in zazen/ dropping-off-body-and-mind, when thinking calms down and our mind clarifies, we can notice times when we're sitting in an open, restful state where there is no 'me' as opposed 'that', no 'inside' as opposed 'outside'. This is us experiencing ourselves as undivided from everything else. All that separates us from this state of realisation is a thin veil of thoughts and feelings that we might habitually mistake as the self. But the real self, the selfless-self or our 'buddha-natur...
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 ...
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