Dogen Zen Belfast

  Let me get this right out of the way first - Nishijima Roshi was not a Marxist! However, like a lot of intelligent, inquiring and philosophically-minded people of his generation (and subsequent generations, even in countries where Marx's writings were effectively banned or got you investigated or blacklisted, as in the USA), he had read Marx and was familiar with his ideas and theories. In his main work Das Kapital, Marx adapted the idealistic dialectical modality of his teacher Hegel and used it to examine and lay bare the workings and inherent material and social conflicts of the capitalist mode of production and capitalist society. Nishijima Roshi mentions this all in his intro to Shobogenzo. This is relevant to Shobogenzo as Master Dogen also presents a sort of radical dialectical view, as laid out in Shobogenzo Genjo-Koan...   Basically, he [Master Dogen] looks at a problem from two sides, and then tries to synthesize the two viewpoints into a middle way. This method h...

I'm certainly no expert, but I've read some of the old Zen texts and practiced a small bit, and what it boils down to is the movement from experiencing the world and our life in terms of our thinking to sensing, feeling or experiencing it directly. This is what the central practice of Zen, zazen, is about - 'dropping off body and mind'. It's a simple idea, but it has profound implications when we actually do it, because so much of what we generally consider our life is based on thought, on memories and values and the implied narratives that we may take to be 'me'. And much of our society and culture may be based on the erroneous acceptance of human thought as our ultimate reality ('I think therefore I am'). What we feel/ encounter/ experience when we practice dropping all that for a while is the quick of our dynamic, ungraspable life as it happens spontaneously here in the open, fleeting present moment. The seeming incompatibility between the solidit...