After the incident by the Sengawa River I didn’t just drop my Zen practice, feeling that I’d accomplished what I’d wanted to and no longer needed it. In fact, I felt like I needed it more than ever. I’ve kept on sitting every day and attending retreats. I even started running some of my own retreats. After moving to California in 2004 I made friends with some of the folks up at the San Francisco Zen Center and thereby wormed my way into a loose association with one of the loveliest Zen places on Earth, the monastic retreat center Tassajara near Big Sur in Northern California. Every summer for the past few years I’ve spent a month there.
Tassajara is the most isolated place I’ve been to. Just to get there you have to travel up, up, up into the mountains and then down, down, down into a canyon along a fourteen-mile narrow dirt road with a steep cliff on one side and a dense forest on the other. TV, radio, and cell phone signals don’t reach Tassajara, and naturally there’s no Internet access. When you’re in Tassajara you feel like the outside world is very far away.
I went to Tassajara my first summer ostensibly to do two different things. For most of the month I was down there, I was kind of a glorified waiter. For my last couple of days at Tassajara I was a guest lecturer, and I gave a talk titled “Dogen’s Concept of God.”
My friend Greg Fain is the tanto, or practice leader, at Tassajara. Greg invited me to come down and give some talks. I didn’t just want to zip in there, say some stuff, and zip out. So I asked Greg if I could sign up to be a work practice student for a few weeks and then give some talks at the end of my stay. He conferred with the management, and they said I could do this crazy thing.
First, let me explain what a work practice student is. Tassajara wasn’t always a Zen monastery. In the 1860s it was established as a resort. People went up and down that big, long road not for spiritual awakening but to booze it up and lounge around in the natural hot springs. I’ve heard there was even a brothel on the premises. In 1966 Tassajara was on its last legs as a vacation spot and the San Francisco Zen Center bought the place to use as a monastery, but the former owners stipulated they must keep the summer guest season going. These days the San Francisco Zen Center finances the monastery at Tassajara by opening it up as a resort every summer. For four months the Zen students are moved into the shabbier cabins, and the better cabins are rented to rich folks who want to hang out in the hot springs.
There is no paid staff at Tassajara. All the guest relations and suchlike are handled by work practice students. These students follow a regular Zen schedule in the mornings and evenings and spend the rest of their days doing the jobs necessary to keep the resort running. This includes cleaning rooms, making beds, cooking, keeping the pool and bathhouse running, keeping cranky customers happy, and so forth.
I’d been traveling around the world for three or four months before going to Tassajara. I was the toast of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, with rabid fans clawing their way to see me in Helsinki, Belfast, Warsaw, Toulouse, Berlin, Amsterdam, Tel Aviv, Shizuoka, and elsewhere. Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit. I’m not really that famous, though I have been stopped in the street by folks who like my books, and once, when I was paying by credit card for a used book in Knoxville, Tennessee, the clerk said, “I thought I recognized you! I love your books!” And although most of my tours have gone really well, a couple of personal appearances in Europe attracted as few as three people. Still, I am famous enough nowadays that it’s starting to be a little weird. It’s usually nice. But sometimes it’s awkward.
My lifestyle was drawing me further and further away from my Zen practice. It’s hard to sit zazen twice a day when you’re zipping around from place to place faster than a speeding bullet, meeting people, hanging out, seeing the sights, getting fed, and all the rest. I felt that I needed the rigorous schedule, the ridiculous rules, and the hard work Tassajara requires of its students to get myself back on track.
I was assigned to the dining room, where I was something like a waiter or busboy. I served food, brewed and poured coffee, bused dishes, scraped compost into buckets, and did most of the stuff waiters or busboys do. I even opened wine bottles. It’s BYOB there; no alcohol is sold or served, though it is sometimes poured. That was on days when I wasn’t assigned to be a dishwasher.
I have to admit, my first few days on the job I was all like, “Don’t these people know who I am? I am one of the most important voices in Buddhism today! Refill your coffee? Ha! You should be so lucky as to get your coffee refilled by a star of my caliber!”
Again, I’m exaggerating. Though I did sometimes feel a little resentful. And a few guests recognized me. But by and large the rich folks who rent rooms at Tassajara aren’t my target audience. I was more often spotted by students. That was okay, though, because it doesn’t take long getting over being star-struck by a guy you see hauling stinky buckets of compost and cleaning encrusted crud off the samovar.* As Greg said, when I told him about all this, “It’s a great way to study the self.” It sure was.
I had a few adventures and met some amazing people. I formed a punk rock band and got my first Mohawk (which looked great with my hated Zen robes, which I wore every day). I learned some new jokes (Q: What has two knees and swims in the ocean? A: A two-knee fish!). It was totally worth it, which is why I went back the next two summers for more of the same.
But I also had to talk about Dogen and God. Twice a week they have what they call Dining Room Talks. They clear out the dining room between lunch and dinner and someone gives a speech. Sometimes it’s a guest from the outside world, and sometimes it’s someone who lives at Tassajara. I will try to encapsulate here what I said.
People often think of Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism, as a religion without God. Remember, D. T. Suzuki, whose works are still considered authoritative by many, said “Zen has no God to worship, no ceremonial rites to observe, no future abode to which the dead are destined.” Furthermore he said, “last of all, Zen has no soul whose welfare is to be looked after by somebody else and whose immortality is a matter of intense concern with some people.”
Dogen would probably agree with this. Dogen wrote a voluminous treatise on Zen practice called Shobogenzo, or “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye,” which I mentioned earlier, as well as numerous other works on Zen. He also brought the Soto school of Zen Buddhism from China to Japan. In Japan, Soto soon became the most popular school of Zen Buddhism and remains so today.
What makes Dogen different from most philosophers is that it wasn’t just talk with him. He had a practice. Dogen advocated a type of meditation he called shikantaza, or “just sitting.” This type of meditation is goal-less. It’s not focused on attaining special states of mind or insight, and it’s unconcerned with the so-called enlightenment experiences that some other schools of Buddhism consider essential to the practice. Dogen taught that sitting zazen, which means “seated meditation,” itself is enlightenment. To Dogen, the sitting was everything.
I’ve been talking a lot about shikantaza in this book, without actually naming it as such, because it’s the practice I do every day. After nearly thirty years of daily shikantaza I have yet to get to the bottom of it. Ironically, even though it’s taken so many years to get even a little way into this practice, I can state the philosophical basis for it quite simply.
Shikantaza proceeds from the view that all our thoughts and perceptions are by necessity incomplete and, to either a large or small degree, mistaken. There is no way to encompass reality in your mind. The brain does its job, in part, by deliberately ignoring most of the data it receives and by focusing only on the material it needs. Furthermore, the data the brain receives is itself already limited to what our senses are able to perceive.
One of the things the brain does is create an image of the self. Like all its images, the image of the self is by necessity incomplete. But it’s a model that is usually useful for most of the activities we engage in.
The problem is that we believe that these various incomplete and mistaken images our brain has created — including the image of our self — are reality. We think we are perceiving and conceiving of reality when, in fact, reality is beyond our perceptive ability and our powers of conception. At the same time, however, we are living in reality. The fact that we cannot grasp the totality of what we’re living in doesn’t change this.
Shikantaza-style meditation practice forces us to fully live in reality as it is beyond our conceptions and perceptions. It forces us to remain profoundly in the here and now, even when our minds, and often our senses too, try to seduce us with beautiful or frightening images of other places and times or to convince us that sitting and staring at a wall is really dull and that there must be better things going on elsewhere.
As one might expect from a monk devoted to this style of meditation, Dogen’s writing never mentions God specifically. The monotheism of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was completely unknown to him.
In spite of this, I believe that Dogen’s Buddhism directly addresses questions about the nature of God and about our relationship to God. One chapter of Shobogenzo in particular presents us with a clear description of Dogen’s concept of God.
The chapter is called “Inmo” in Japanese. In the introduction to the translation of this chapter he did with Mike Cross, Gudo Nishijima explains the word inmo: “Inmo is a colloquial word in Chinese, meaning ‘it,’ ‘that,’ or ‘what.’ We usually use the words ‘it,’ ‘that,’ or ‘what’ to indicate something we do not need to explain. Therefore Buddhist philosophers in China used the word inmo to suggest something ineffable. At the same time, one of the aims of studying Buddhism is to realize reality, and according to Buddhist philosophy, reality is something ineffable. So the word inmo was used to indicate the truth, or reality, which in Buddhist philosophy is originally ineffable.”
Whenever I read this chapter I tend to substitute the word God for inmo. I don’t know what else Dogen could possibly be talking about other than God.
All words are misleading. This fact is one of the cornerstones of Zen philosophy. There is no way to choose exactly the right word or phrase to fully encompass and clearly communicate any thought. As Lou Reed rightly points out in the song “Some Kinda Love,” “between thought and expression lies a lifetime.” Even thoughts themselves are incomplete. So language is at best an approximation of an approximation.
Still, it’s useful to look at what Dogen wrote about his concept of God. So here goes.
In the chapter Dogen begins by quoting an ancient Zen teacher who said, “If you want to attain the matter that is it [inmo], you must be a person who is it [inmo]. Already being a person who is it [inmo], why worry about the matter that is it [inmo]?” This statement reflects Dogen’s original reasons for pursuing Buddhist practice. He had heard from various teachers that Buddhism’s message was that we were already innately perfect just as we were. Then why, he asked, do we need to perform the various rituals and practices of Buddhism, such as meditation? No one he met was able to answer his question, until he traveled to China, where he met Master Tendo Nyojo,* who told him that the practice of zazen was enlightenment itself.
In the next paragraph Dogen begins to describe what this “it” is, and this is where he starts to talk about God. He says that another name for “it” is the “supreme truth of bodhi.” The word bodhi means “enlightenment” or “awakening.” Dogen says, “The situation of this supreme truth of bodhi is such that even the whole universe in ten directions is just a small part of the supreme truth of bodhi: it may be that the truth of bodhi abounds beyond the universe.”
To my way of thinking this is just another way of describing God. Of course, this is not the personal creator God revered by lots of religious people. In her book A History of God, Karen Armstrong quotes the Roman Catholic catechism she had to memorize as a child, which said, “God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself and is infinite in all perfections.” Dogen is clearly not talking about this kind of God.
The problem with the idea of God as an infinite being is that we’re already contradicting ourselves. Something that’s infinite is unlimited. But the word being, when used as a noun, refers to one being among other beings. God can’t possibly be infinite unless he is also not infinite. I suppose the catechism gives itself an out by describing God as “infinite in all perfections” rather than truly infinite.
But Dogen’s “it” doesn’t indicate a God who sits on a throne in heaven being perfect and infinite and who is forever separate from the universe he created. When you really examine it, all the attributes commonly ascribed to God ultimately make no sense. Everybody knows the old joke, “Can God make a rock so heavy even he can’t lift it?” It sounds kind of juvenile, but it’s actually a very good question that points out the absurdity of limiting God in any way, including by saying he is infinite as opposed to things that are not infinite. One of my favorite parts of Dogen’s chapter about God addresses this matter:
Already we possess the real features of a “person who is it”; we should not worry about the already-present “matter that is it.” Even worry itself is just “the matter that is it,” and so it is beyond worry. This state cannot be fathomed even by the consideration of buddha and it cannot be fathomed by the consideration of the whole universe. It can only be described “Already you are a person who is it: why worry about [attaining] the matter that is it?”
To me this is the perfect description of the infinite, of God. But it’s not an intellectual supposition about what infinity might be like. It’s more a description of one man’s deep and very human connection with the infinite. This connection is not unique to Dogen. We all have it.
We don’t need to search for God or wonder whether God exists. Our very sense of wonder is God wondering. This is more than an intellectual assurance of God’s presence, or some clever twisting of words. Dogen was writing about his real experience.
Dogen goes on to say, about God’s interaction with the universe and with us, “We ourselves are tools that ‘it’ possesses within this universe in ten directions.” In other words, God is not remote and removed from our everyday experience. We ourselves are the means by which God experiences his creation, which is also himself.
We may doubt that this is so. But, Dogen says, “We know it is so because the body and the mind both appear in the universe, yet neither is our self.” To illustrate this point he says, “The body, already, is not ‘I.’ Its life moves on through days and months, and we cannot stop it even for an instant. Where have the red faces [of our youth] gone? When we look for them, they have vanished without a trace. When we reflect carefully, there are many things in the past that we will never meet again.”
Most modern Western philosophy argues a belief in the ultimate separation of body and mind, or matter and spirit. We are told that we must side either with the materialists, who insist that we are just this body, or with spiritual people, who say that we are just a mind, or a soul, that resides within the body. Even most Eastern religions insist on the same idea.
But Buddhism rejects this premise entirely. The Heart Sutra, which is the core text of Zen Buddhism, says, “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” There is no division between body (form) and spirit (emptiness) or between matter and mind. The division we think we perceive and experience is just one of the many categories into which the brain divides our real experience.
I suspect that the body-mind division may be the ultimate division created by the brain. It appears to be a boundary line that our brains are designed not to cross. There may be a very good reason we are wired this way.
Human beings have the biggest, most powerful brains we know of. Our cleverness has been our main survival tool. We can imagine stuff and transform that imagined stuff into real things. We can imagine a spear and imagine stabbing a marauding stegosaurus* with that spear, then go build that spear and live to produce descendants.
But in order to do this we have to understand very clearly the difference between the stuff of our imaginations (one of the definitions of emptiness) and the physical stuff of the real world (form). We need to be able to do this even when the stuff of our imaginations becomes so detailed it’s almost tangible. I believe our brains may have been honed by evolution to make a very sharp distinction between the real and the imagined. Those among our ancestors who couldn’t differentiate between the things they thought about and the things they actually encountered were doomed.
Although we see body and mind as eternally separate, in our real experience body and mind always function together. This is even true in our dreams. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of dreaming about large bodies of water, then waking up to discover you have to pee really bad. The body asserts itself even in states we tend to think of as purely mental, just as the mind asserts itself in states we conceive of as purely physical.
Dogen tells us, “Although the state of sincerity does exist, it is not something that lingers in the vicinity of the personal self.” It’s far too cool to hang out with the likes of you! This “state of sincerity” is one of the more difficult concepts Dogen raises. My first Zen teacher used to talk a lot about sincerity, and I was always confused about what he meant.
Sincerity in this case is not just honesty. It’s something deeper than that. The word is used to indicate a state that is completely open and unaffected. It is us, as we truly are, without any attempt to disguise ourselves, even in the ways we usually disguise ourselves to ourselves.
The word that Nishijima and Cross have translated as “sincere mind” is sekishin, which literally means “red mind.” The color red indicates rawness, like a piece of uncooked meat. So it refers to something untainted or pure, something as it exists in its natural state before we make any deliberate changes to it.
This sincere state does not linger in the vicinity of the personal self. You are not what you imagine yourself to be. That imagined “self” is just another concept the brain creates to sort things out. The boundaries it posits for this thing it calls self don’t really exist any more than any of the other boundaries the brain creates in order to make conceptual sense of the universe.
Even if the sincere mind is not the same as the personal sense of self, “there is something that, in the limitlessness, establishes the [bodhi] mind.” The bodhi mind is the will toward the truth. Our longing for the truth is the truth itself. We are always at least dimly aware that we live better when we live in accordance with what is true. All the religions I know about say this. The problem is that most religions proceed to try and explain the truth and then insist that we agree with their explanation. In Buddhism we’re not very concerned with explanations of the truth. We ‘re interested in living it.
According to Dogen, we live the truth when, “abandoning our former playthings we hope to hear what we have not heard before and we seek to experience what we have not experienced before.” In other words, that which we have never heard or experienced before is the present moment. This moment is, by definition, something you have never experienced. Even if you’ve stood in a dozen subways reading countless books before, you’ve never stood in this subway on this day reading this book ever before. The things we have heard and experienced before include our received wisdom, our history, our preconceived notions. Most people remain rooted in the things they have experienced before. Even new experiences are quickly cataloged and referenced to the past.
Yet Dogen says that this is not entirely of our own doing. We arouse this bodhi-mind because we are people who are “it.” But if you’re skeptical about God, this idea might strike you as something akin to saying, “I know God exists because I believe in God and only God could make me believe in God.” This, of course, is circular logic. It’s not really defensible. But this is emphatically not what Dogen is saying here.
Rather, he is pointing at something that is beyond matters of thought or belief. The very fact that we are here to ask questions about God is evidence that God exists. Or to put it another way, it is evidence that some kind of intelligence is at work in the universe. This intelligence is not far away out there. It is the very intelligence that makes it possible for you to comprehend this book. And I don’t believe that intelligence is something produced by me alone for me alone. I think it’s something that what I call “me” partakes of in much the same way I partake of air or sunlight. Some might try to say that God is pure consciousness. But that’s not the Buddhist view, either. God is beyond consciousness and beyond unconsciousness. I’ll talk more about this in a later chapter.
That’s what I think Dogen believed about God. Because God is ultimately unknowable, Dogen made no effort to describe God’s characteristics. God is just “it.”
*A samovar, by the way, is a big machine for making industrial-sized quantities of coffee. I learned useful stuff while I was there!
*In Chinese, Tiantong Rujing.
*I know that the stegosaurus was extinct 100 million years before the first humans appeared. But I always loved those movies where cavemen fight dinosaurs.