Shobogenzo Shoji 4: The Radical Middle Way.

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Master Dogen's exploration of the Great Matter of our real life and death continues... 

 

This life-and-death is just the sacred life of buddha. If we hate it and want to get rid of it, that is just wanting to lose the sacred life of buddha. If we stick in it, if we attach to life-and-death, this also is to lose the sacred life of buddha. We confine ourselves to the condition of buddha.

 

Again, some schools of Buddhism and other philosophies saw this, our life-and-death, as something to be overcome, to be transcended for a higher spiritual reality and such. Master Dogen again emphasizes that this life is where it's at - this is the only place and time we will ever clarify the nature of our life-death.

At the same time, we don't attach to life-death. 'Buddha' is not a fixed state or principle or psychological 'zone' or some sort of place we eventually arrive at. This is what we clarify in 'dropping off body and mind' in zazen and in the rest of our life.

This practice, this discipline, is the mode of realizing freedom from our own assumed mental self or selves, and so Master Dogen highlights this tension between discipline and freedom, 'confining ourselves to the condition of buddha'.

There is a sense of balance here, a 'middle way', although this term is somewhat abused in western Buddhism - some seem to see it as not taking a position on anything, as a place of personal psychological retreat or safety where we don't have views on anything. This is not the middle way. Zen practice is not personal therapy, nor hedonistic escapism, nor a means to further shirk our responsibilities to each other. We don't practice to escape the reality of our life-death in the world. The middle way is on one hand a radical realization that we are not in the least bit separate from this world, and on the other hand it is the realization that we are free to act within the confines of our conditions in this world of either samsara or nirvana, as based on all of our personal and collective actions.

The middle way, in Mahayana Zen Buddhism, is the means whereby and the realization that we are an ungraspable but very active part of this world including all its beauty, and all its delusional ideologies, dire injustices, racism, hatreds and violence. It's all our life-and-death.

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