16

Dropping Body and Mind: Understanding Dōgen

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI      TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER      STEVEN HEINE

 

First, why is Dōgen such a pivotal figure in the history of Zen?

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI: Beyond Dōgen’s significance as the key figure in the establishment of the Sōtō school, I think he is tremendously helpful to practitioners because he was a very good student. He combines radical thought with the poignancy of a spiritual disciple’s journey. Dōgen speaks right to the heart of the matter. He has the poet’s vastness and the practitioner’s commitment to particulars.

Dōgen challenged not just conventional thought but conventional activity. He asked us to look into the real nature of expression—the mystery of birth, death, and time. He asked us to take up these issues in a genuine way and to question every word.

TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON: Dōgen is uniquely important to American practitioners because he introduced the Zen mode of Buddhism to Japan. Likewise, we are now in the early stages of introducing Buddhism to our culture, so there are a lot of lessons we can take from how he faced this challenge.

Dōgen’s practice is counterintuitive to how a lot of Buddhists think, whereby meditation and practice are seen as a means to future enlightenment and the achievement of a goal. Part of what makes him a little difficult for Americans is our consumer orientation. He presents something complete as it is. Practice and realization are one thing. Practice is the expression of realization. His writing is difficult because he is not trying to present a doctrine or philosophy but rather talking to practitioners in a very playful way.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Dōgen really did set the tone for Japanese Zen. He inspired the whole flavor of Zen we are familiar with. It’s the feeling of entering into the present moment profoundly, the feeling that produces the tea ceremony and flower arranging. It’s the sacredness and power that comes with just being present. This sacredness is the underlying feeling of Dōgen’s writing and it sets the tone for the Japanese approach to Buddhism.

In another vein, Dōgen’s philosophies and intellectual contributions are stunningly contemporary, especially his philosophy of language, which has been much discussed and written about in various arenas of postmodern thought. When the Japanese were looking for an indigenous, profound philosophy that could stack up against Western philosophy, they hit on Dōgen as a thinker equal in sophistication to Western thinkers of a much later time.

TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON: The Shōbōgenzō essays are very philosophical—that’s why modern philosophers have been very impressed with Dōgen—yet these long essays make it a little more difficult for people to feel the person of Dōgen. Even though the shorter talks in the Eihei Kōroku were given to monks in a more formal style, paradoxically they reveal Dōgen’s personality more.

Dōgen is commonly thought to have emphasized monasticism, and he did work hard to train a group of monastic disciples. Yet I think Dōgen is very relevant in America, where most people doing Zen are practicing in the context of their everyday lives of work and relationship. Paradoxically, Dōgen’s monastic writings, like Instructions to the Cook, give an orientation to applying awareness and presence to everyday activity. These monastic writings are relevant to the way that Americans are practicing precisely because they deal with the mundane details of day-to-day living.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: The Shōbōgenzō is written in informal Japanese and is much more difficult and formal. The Eihei Kōroku is written in a formal Chinese and yet is much more informal and easier to understand. For one thing, there is a language game that Dōgen plays in Shōbōgenzō. If you read it for ten or twenty years, you begin to get a feeling for it. It’s a kind of intellectual yoga. In many cases, Dōgen is dealing with the nature of language and thought and how to bring language and thought in line with Buddhist practice. Reading Shōbōgenzō itself becomes a practice of mental yoga that involves trying to harmonize with Dōgen’s way of expression. Once you get used to it, it isn’t nearly as impenetrable as it seems when you are outside of his style.

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI: To encounter Dōgen is to be stopped in the course of your events, to lift the needle from the record. When you have the willingness to be stopped in the middle of the flow of language or to have your attention brought to a seemingly mundane activity, you are encountering Dōgen. The way that Dōgen seems to work on us may be particularly pertinent in our culture, where people seem so insistent on charging along. Whatever level of formal practice you are engaged in, if you are willing to let attention be a way to encounter the matter at hand, you shift away from the usual spirit of acquisition, of getting it, of gaining access.

That is the first step: a willingness to allow genuine attention to be there. When that is in place, then you have trust, as opposed to the kind of arrogance that discards what is not immediately revealed. We shift for a minute from instant soup Dharma to the deep flavors of a long-cooking soup. Then if you apply the real heat—the zazen, the study with a teacher, and the liturgy that maintains your allegiance to mystery—you have rich possibilities that can work within or outside a formal training structure. Part of what we miss when we allude to Dōgen’s difficulty is that when we spend time in the kind of attention he demands we become inspired, encouraged, and involved in a way that is impossible to describe.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: One of Dōgen’s chief purposes is to show you that the conventional, ordinary, taken-for-granted way of thinking and looking at the world is actually the cause of your being bound and suffering and confused. So he demonstrates it rather than saying that to you in the conventional way. His language is the undoing of language. That’s what makes it hard to understand on a conventional level. When you do have the experience of going along with him in unmaking language and exposing your conceptualization, it is soaring, wonderful, and inspiring.

What is the central characteristic of Dōgen’s zazen?

TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON: Zazen is not a practice for future realization in Dōgen, as we noted. For Dōgen it is a celebration, a ceremony. I think it has to do with his roots in Tendai, the Vajrayāna of Japan, which he practiced before going to China. Zazen, for Dōgen, is a way of expressing something deep, of enacting it. It is expressing the possibility of just being present with the reality appearing in our thoughts and feelings, as well as in sounds, sensations, and posture.

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI: Perhaps the central characteristic of Dōgen’s zazen is that there is no central characteristic.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: I don’t know of anybody who writes about and speaks about zazen in such an inspiring way as Dōgen does. His understanding of zazen is crucial.

We thought it would be interesting to choose several short selections from Dōgen for you to comment on, to illustrate how one works with Dōgen’s expression of the Dharma. We could begin with these passages from the Gabyō fascicle in Shōbōgenzō:

An ancient buddha said, “The painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger.” This statement has been studied by ancient buddhas and present buddhas. Nevertheless, it has become the mere chatter of seekers in grass-roof huts and under trees. . . . If you say a painting is not real, then the myriad things are not real. If the myriad things are not real, then Buddhadharma is not real. As Buddhadharma is real, a painted rice cake is real.

TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON: He’s taking a traditional saying from a kōan, going back to the idea that Zen is not expressed in words and letters and that the sutras are only a painting of a rice cake. What Dōgen does in this section is a typical example of his undercutting false dichotomies and dualistic thinking. He ends up by saying that only a painted rice cake can satisfy hunger.

In so doing, he is stylizing the whole thing. He’s talking about truly understanding what our hunger is and what our satisfaction is and that, in fact, everything is painted. Even our idea of painting is yet another painting. He is undercutting the way we think of satisfying and satisfaction. This relates to the First Noble Truth, and the nature of our hunger and dissatisfaction, how we create suffering by separating ourselves from the world and by reifying false dichotomies.

There is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. Without painted hunger, you never become a true person. It is necessary to take on something that looks artificial—the forms and the structure of Zen—in order to see true reality, because there is no understanding other than painted satisfaction.

STEVEN HEINE: The pattern is to create a conceptual reversal. Dōgen starts with the original expression “painted rice cakes do not satisfy hunger,” and leads us to the conclusion that only painted rice cakes satisfy hunger. I think we could safely guess that if the original expression had been “painted rice cakes do satisfy hunger,” he would have turned it the other way round.

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI: He lifts the burden from what is a word and what is silence and asks, what is it that satisfies hunger? It beckons us to just say hello, to meet eye to eye. Even if it’s just passing a bag of groceries from cashier to customer, there is a living realization at that moment, and the bottomless hunger and the immeasurable offering meet right there, right here.

Is Dōgen like Nāgārjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka school, in the sense that there is no ideology to look for but only a process of working on your mind?

STEVEN HEINE: Dōgen’s bottom line is remarkably similar to Nāgārjuna’s, in terms of deconstructing misconceptions and not leading to a fixed conclusion but open-endedly divulging the array of possibilities.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: I agree. But on the other hand, the writings of Nāgārjuna that are usually cited are wholly philosophical. Dōgen wonderfully combines philosophical perspectives, mind yoga, and very specific details about how to practice.

He is also leading a community.

TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON: That’s very important. In all of Dōgen’s writings, whether they were written or given as a talk, he was talking to particular people. It’s easy to abstract Dōgen’s writings as if he were a philosopher presenting doctrine, but he is always talking directly to someone. He is a spiritual teacher, not a philosopher, even though what he left us could be seen as profound philosophy.

STEVEN HEINE: Dōgen was developing this multiperspective outlook in his teaching so that it would address different audiences but not compromise its ability to be heard by many other possible receivers of the message. This was an important feature of the monastery system he was trying to develop.

Let’s consider a passage from one of the Shōbōgenzō fascicles that many people find quite difficult, Uji, or “Existence-Time”:

Time is already just Existence, and all Existence is Time. The sixteen-foot golden body is Time itself. Because it is Time, it has the resplendent brightness of Time. We should learn it as the twelve hours of the day.

TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON: Uji relates to traditional Buddhist ideas about time. When I talk about this, I always refer to the ten times of the Huayan school: the past, present, and future of the past; the past, present, and future of the present and of the future; and all nine of those together. Dōgen’s point is that time is our being, our presence, our experience. It’s not some external container. Time also moves in many different directions; it’s multidimensional. It’s not, as he says, yesterday to today to tomorrow. It’s moving in many different ways. We start to understand, for example, how talking about the past changes the meaning of the past right now and in the future. The story we tell about the past makes the meaning of the past different, depending on what story we choose to tell.

He says we should question our idea of time. We don’t get rid of the idea of nine o’clock, ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, but we can get rid of the idea of time as an external container. There is not an absolute, ultimate envelope of time that we are in.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: Recently I was studying Uji once again and at the same time I was studying a book by Abraham Joshua Heschel called The Sabbath. It turns out that the Sabbath is all about time. Heschel’s philosophy of time divides time and space. He says space is the material world and time is inherently sacred. That’s also Dōgen’s take-home message. He’s saying that we think of time as some objective physical container in which we are moving, but, in fact, time is a flow of being. It’s a flow of our being not limited to our small, physical, locatable selves; rather, it is our immense buddha-selves. When we recognize time as that, our experience of being, our experience of time, becomes quite different. Heschel’s idea of time is not the same as Dōgen’s idea of time, but I think it does help to understand and appreciate what Dōgen is saying. He’s making an argument for the sacredness, the nonobjectivity of time, and the inseparability of time from ourselves.

STEVEN HEINE: You can compare Dōgen’s view of time with modern physics. You can compare it with Jewish mysticism or other forms of philosophy or theology. You can illuminate it from a number of different directions. For example, philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger have had ideas that have similarities. However, Dōgen is not particularly systematic in his approach to time. We wish we could sit him down and say, “OK, give it to us straight.” But the message overall seems to be about the internalizing time. You are in control of time; you are the master of the moment. Break down the barriers of practice and realization, the barrier between means and ends. Time is being, being is time, and it’s within us.

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI: “The resplendent brightness of time” is a good phrase to let wash over you. This is Dōgen’s great shout. Knowing without knowing is resplendent. You trust that shaking of the eardrums. When one of these arrives from Dōgen, it settles in my heart and I feel like someone’s hand is on my shoulder. It leaves my intellect and becomes a sense of pressure on the skin, a touch.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: This teaching is also quite practical. The other day I was working with a group of business people on time management. Everybody was so freaked out, doing all these things at once and feeling oppressed by time. So I talked to them about Uji. I’m working on this myself, because I also run around. So I remind myself, “Wait a minute. Time is not this objective, outer phenomenon whereby I have to do this many things in this amount of time. Time is my life, time is being.” As soon as I realize that, I don’t need to feel time pressure. The businesspeople understood this.

Let’s consider a famous line from Genjōkōan: “To study the self is to forget the self.”

TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON: Many students, when they hear this, want to jump right to forgetting the self. The point of it is we need to keep studying the self. That is forgetting the self. As the Dalai Lama has said, nonself in Buddhism doesn’t mean getting rid of the ego. Just keep watching the experience of the self as it is; the forgetting happens all on its own.

STEVEN HEINE: In Chuang Tzu and philosophical Taoism generally, they use “forgetting” in the positive sense as letting go. It’s not absentmindedness but a sense of casting off distractions. In the same passage, Dōgen refers to the casting off or dropping away of body-mind (shinjin datsuraku). What is emphasized here is the positive sense of moving beyond the distractions, limitations, and the conventionality that binds us and causes us to struggle. Forgetting the self happens naturally in the process of study because we move beyond it each time we study it a little bit more.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: These two phrases are identities. If someone asks, “What is studying the self?” it is forgetting the self. If someone asks, “What is forgetting the self?” it is studying the self.

The other two sides in this famous section are also identities. If you really study the self, you are confirmed by all dharmas. If you are really confirmed by all dharmas, you have understood the nature of the self. If you are talking about ego, that means you understand the context and the point of the egoself rather than being tied up in knots by it. You understand its purpose and its function and how to work with it. So, as Taigen was saying, the object here is not to kill the ego but to see it as it actually is. It should function in a healthy and beautiful way in the context of the entire universe, rather than being a matter of “I am just stuck on me.”

TAIGEN DAN LEIGHTON: Forgetting the self is “dropping body and mind.” Dōgen uses that phrase much more than he uses, for example, just sitting. All through the Eihei Kōroku, he uses this phrase as a seeming synonym for zazen.

This whole paragraph in Genjokōan is a description of what our practice is. Dropping body and mind is an ongoing thing. It’s not that it happens once and you’re finished with it. Practically speaking, we see that even after studying Dōgen for thirty years there’s no end to studying the self and there is no end to dropping body and mind. In each moment, we are faced with new situations, a new moment of being-time. Once again, we have to bring this whole process of studying the self, forgetting the self, dropping body and mind, into our experience right now.

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI: It has to slap you in the face a little bit. We hear the words and we tend to receive them as if we were receiving a commandment, rather than an implicit question about the nature of who we are. What is it to remember the self? Is that not studying? What is it that’s not studying? What is it to be enlightened? What are you talking about? The slap is the quality of catching you when you think you know the significance.

We could conclude by considering Dōgen’s statement from the Kattō chapter of Shōbōgenzō, “My life has been one continuous mistake.”

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI: We should appreciate how freeing that is. There is no escaping the mistake.

TAGIEN DAN LEIGHTON: It’s extremely important in practice to make mistakes. We can never learn anything if we don’t make mistakes. It has a lot to do with beginner’s mind, or not knowing. To accept the limitations of this moment of being-time means that we know we are making a mistake right now. Yet we have to be willing to do that to actually practice.

We can say that we learn from our mistakes, but the attitude of just being open to the reality of the mistake in front of me and witnessing mistake upon mistake and being willing to meet, engage, assess, and celebrate the mistake is the ongoing practice. This is the Buddha going beyond Buddha that Dōgen speaks of. It’s a very dynamic, enlarged process.

BONNIE MYOTAI TREACE, SENSEI: It asks us to look at how to make mistakes perfectly. When we are aware of causing pain or causing confusion and that’s palpable, it hurts. To be able to face that and not let that break our life and our practice is one of the highest mountains. And it is born in that very deep valley that we usually like to avoid.

ZOKETSU NORMAN FISCHER: In our practice, the process goes on forever. “Continuous” implies that. We don’t come to the place where we say, “Now I’ve got it. I’ve got the whole thing down. It’s perfection.” The sense of an ever more subtle, ever more refined understanding and development without end is what this saying implies. It always unfolds in front of you. I wouldn’t want any other way of practice.