When Human Nature is Buddha-Nature

-

Last time, in relation to Master Dogen's chapter about Buddhist ethics or 'not doing wrong', I mentioned the area of human nature. This is a pretty important matter, as our view of it can in no small way determine how we view ourselves, other people, society and humanity.

Basically, Buddhism sees humans as fundamentally good, until we do something wrong. This is why Master Dogen takes the very practical angle of 'not doing wrongs' - if we're not doing wrongs then right is already happening. Buddhism has a fairly open, positive view of human nature then, or at least it sees that our inherently good nature, our buddha-nature, is always accessible to us when we just stop doing wrongs. Buddha-nature is when we are realising that we are not our thoughts and feelings and are in accord with wider reality. In "dropping off body and mind" we express and actualise buddha-nature. Any 'buddha-nature' other than this is just a thought, an imagining, a religious or spiritual fantasy... 

This can be compared to, say, the influential view of Thomas Hobbes, the 17th century thinker who theorised that if humans were left to their own devices they would return to a 'state of nature' where they would turn on each other and revert to all manner of savagery. Mad Max shit... This assumption as to human nature meant they therefore required the rule of a powerful leader, a 'leviathan', to keep them in order and save them from themselves. This idea proved very popular, and it chimed well with the Christian idea of Original Sin, that we are all a bit tainted by the jiggery-pokery that went on between the snake, the apple and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. It justifes harsh rule and even totalitarianism, and was an accepted idea about human nature for a long time that still endures in political circles to this day.

Anyway, I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of various ideologies regarding human nature. The point is that in Master Dogen's approach buddha-nature, and our human nature, is a matter of what we actually do in the real world, not abstract notions or imaginings in our heads.

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