Shobogenzo Shoji 6: How to Become Buddha.

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Master Dogen ends this short chapter on the Great Matter of our life and death with a very direct statement on what it is to be a buddha:

 

There is a very easy way to become buddha. Not committing wrongs; being without attachment to life-and-death; showing deep compassion for all living beings, venerating those above and pitying those below; being free of the mind that dislikes the ten thousand things and free of the mind that desires them; the mind being without thought and without grief: this is called buddha. Look for nothing else. 

Shobogenzo Shoji

Year not recorded.

 

Buddhism had become an institutionalised religion by Master Dogen's time, and like many religions it provides objects of faith and veneration and worship. Master Dogen however wants to indicate how people can directly realise for themselves what the Buddha realised, and not 'look for anything else' based on erroneous views and beliefs as to what fantastical or mystical things 'buddha' might be.

'The mind without thought and without grief', our own mind left as it is, can be directly realised after we have sat zazen for a while: Problems dissolve and disappear; old certainties as to what we are and our place in society and the world can drop away; the barriers we erect between an imagined 'self' and an imagined 'outside world' can be seen as mental fictions; the 'me' whose death we live in dread of can be seen as less solid, more illusory... this is not difficult to do if we sincerely 'just sit' zazen and drop thoughts and aims and intentions in doing so. The only 'thing' between us and buddha is a thin veil of thoughts and feelings that we generally take to be ourselves. It can all be dropped off in a few moments of sitting, and come to be fully realised and expressed on an ongoing basis in zazen practice and throughout all of our everyday life-death.

 

And that's the end of this short reading of Shobogenzo Shoji. 

 

May all beings be happy. May all beings be well. May all beings enjoy full realisation. Dropping off body and mind may we enjoy full realisation together with every single thing.  

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