Shobogenzo Shoaku-Makusa 5: Karma Chameleons.

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Master Dogen continues his talk on Buddhist ethics on the basis of the very practical term 'do not commit wrongs'. In this section he explores the area of our personal karma in practice, cause and effect...


In walking, standing, sitting, and lying down through the twelve hours, we should carefully consider the fact that when living beings are becoming buddhas and becoming patriarchs, we are becoming Buddhist patriarchs, even though this [becoming] does not hinder the [state of a] Buddhist patriarch which has always belonged to us.


There is a mutuality to Buddhist practice: When in our actions we are realising that we are fundamentally free, that we are not our thoughts and feelings, we are realising that all living beings are like that, thereby we are making them like that. While this can be described as being the state of being a Buddhist ancestor, this isn't a fixed state, because it is the dynamic state of our real actions right now, which is not hindered by any fixed state or self.


In becoming a Buddhist patriarch, we do not destroy the living being, do not detract from it, and do not lose it; nevertheless, we have got rid of it.


What we may generally identify as our 'self', our thoughts and feelings and memories etc., isn't destroyed and doesn't cease to exist, but we see directly that it isn't really us.


We cause right-and wrong, cause-and-effect, to practice; but this does not mean disturbing, or intentionally producing, cause-and-effect. Cause-and-effect itself, at times, makes us practice. The state in which the original features of this cause-and-effect have already become conspicuous is not committing, it is [the state] without appearance, it is [the state] without constancy, it is not being unclear, and it is not falling down—because it is the state in which [body and mind] have fallen away.


Some people thought that Buddhist practice took us beyond karma, beyond the laws of cause and effect, but Master Dogen recognised that the situation may be more complex than this. We come to Buddhist practice because of causes, and it has an effect: In sitting zazen, sitting in a state of not following or acting out on our thoughts and feelings, we can see directly how cause and effect affects our actions via our habitual thinking and feeling, and because we're sitting still we're stopping doing that.

Nishijima Roshi observed that we are both bound to, and free of, the law of cause and effect. Our thinking, theorising mind mightn't like this much - it wants things to be either A or B, black or white, this or that... but reality doesn't exist on the basis of our thinking, and that's why we practice 'dropping off body and mind' to realise a state that Master Dogen describes elsewhere as 'the state of ambiguity itself'.

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