Shobogenzo Shoji 2: Getting Over Life & Death.

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Shobogenzo Shoji ('Life and Death') begins: 


Because in life-and-death there is buddha, there is no life and death. Again, we can say: Because in life-and-death there is no “buddha,” we are not deluded in life-and-death. [This] meaning was expressed by Kassan and Jozan. [These] are the words of the two Zen Masters; they are the words of people who had got the truth, and so they were decidedly not laid down in vain.


Master Dogen employs his version of the words of previous Zen masters here. The first statement affirms the state of 'buddha', and the second negates the concept 'buddha'... he often does this when looking at a subject - he both affirms it and negates it as a concept. To the logical western mind it looks like a contradiction... something 'is' and 'is not' at the same time? That's not cricket!

We can say there is buddha, but it's not a static thing nor a thing nor an idea we 'get'. It's a manifest but dynamic state of 'dropping off'. Master Dogen uses these phrases in a thesis/ antithesis sort of relationship to point out that the central matter is not some idea nor ideal but a synthesis expressed in action or in practice, and so...

 

A person who wishes to get free from life and death should just illuminate this truth.

 

That is, they should 'take the backward step and turn the light around' and clarify the matter directly in zazen. 

 

If a person looks for buddha outside of life-and-death, that is like pointing a cart north and making for [the south country of] Etsu, or like facing south and hoping to see the North Star. It is to be amassing more and more causes of life and death, and to have utterly lost the way of liberation. When we understand that only life-and-death itself is nirvana, there is nothing to hate as life and death and nothing to aspire to as nirvana. Then, for the first time, the means exist to get free from life and death.

 

Some schools of earlier Buddhism, and some other philosophies and religions, saw our life and death as something to be overcome and discarded for higher spiritual realms, or such ideas. Mahayana Buddhism holds that this life/death itself is the real stuff and place of liberation or nirvana.

The 'dropping off of body and mind' practice that Master Dogen teaches is very direct and thorough. It includes dropping off not only any conventional notion of 'self' or 'me' (memories, hopes, fears, opinions, meanings...) so as to directly clarify that there is no such 'self' that is born to die, but it also involves dropping off any notion that this life-death is inferior to some imagined 'promised land' or spiritual deliverance.

Of course, it would be nice if there was some simple idea or belief that we could grasp that would satisfy our uncertainties around the whole matter of life and death, but as it is it may be that such ideas and beliefs wouldn't satisfy many of us for very long anyway. Master Dogen's way to resolve this, to get free of life and death, is the ongoing practice of directly realising and expressing the thoroughly free nature of our existence in zazen, and in the rest of our life/death.

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