Shobogenzo Shoji 5: And the Meaning of Life Is...

-

 

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

 

When we are without dislike and without longing, then for the first time we enter the mind of buddha. But do not consider it with mind and do not say it with words! When we just let go of our own body and our own mind and throw them into the house of buddha, they are set into action from the side of buddha; then when we continue to obey this, without exerting any force and without expending any mind, we get free from life and death and become buddha. Who would wish to linger in mind?


When we get used to sitting zazen we can directly experience the state of openness and calm after we've allowed the discriminating mind of likes and dislikes, and the thoughts and sensations of longing for things to be different than they actually are, to just come and go. This is the state of buddha in our own practice and experience, and this effortless will carry over into the rest of our life if we practice the same regularly.

'Who would wish to linger in mind?' In 'dropping off body and mind' in zazen we experience our life free of our usual thinking and discriminating, including thoughts of what 'death' is, or what 'life' is. We may find that 'death' as opposed 'life' is no longer a problem then, because life and death are not thoughts in opposition.

Our thinking minds are not really fit for the purpose of understanding the reality of our ongoing life-death. If our thinking mind got some brilliant idea that seemed to answer the 'meaning of life' I don't think it would be satisfied with it for very long. It reminds me of the funny episode in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where a race of humanoids on another planet designed a supercomputer called Deep Thought to answer the question of 'life, the universe and everything'. Deep Thought told its builders that it could indeed come up with an answer to the question, but it would take it 7.5 million years to run the calculation. Anyway, generations upon generations later the people of the planet eagerly assembled having waited 7.5 million years for an answer, by which time the computer had become an object of worship like a god. And after great pomp and ceremony the computer delivered it's answer... 42.

From practicing zazen we can learn directly that really 'answering' the question is not a function of the intellect, but of dropping the same mental functions that give us the erroneous impression that we are a separate being, an identity that we think was born and that will die. This can be difficult to learn, because we like mental certainty, mental security, the familiarity of comfortable ideas that we may have adopted so that they seem to define our lives ("I'm this sort of person", "I'm that sort of person", "I'm a winner", "I'm a loser", "I'm an asshole", "I'm a buddha!"...) The 'house of buddha' is this present time and place manifesting completely free of any such ideas however. It's our house, before we think ourselves out of our effortless, friction-free inheritance.

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