Q&A: From Teacher to Student

I am working on a few new essays, but in the meantime, I wanted to post some answers I sent to a student in response to his questions about Buddhism. It’s been an honor to be a teacher in many ways. One of the greater honors is when students have an unbounded curiosity for a certain subject, and they trust you to be able to give them a reliable answer. That is a very good feeling. The questions and answers are below. They focus on the Buddhist approaches to the concepts of “pain” and “self.” Since adult life is always busy and hectic, I hope these satisfy any curiosities you may have as well before I get any more essays written.

Q: Buddhists believe that pain is a part of life, and yet their key goals are to break that cycle of suffering and escape. So which is it? Do they accept pain as what will inevitably happen or do they reject it and try to escape?

A: Buddhists do believe pain is a part of life, but that pain is a part of life mostly due to an error in our perception regarding our subjective world views and attachment to a sense of individuality/self that separates us from the rest of the living things around us. While the first Noble Truth of Buddhism is usually “Life is Suffering,” the translation never really does justice to the original statement. Here are the first two noble truths as laid out by the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama:

1. Life is dukkha

2. Dukkha arises from/is caused by tanha

Now, the original use of these words is important because depending on how you choose to focus on them it can create either a positive or negative interpretation of Buddhadharma (i.e., Buddhist philosophy). Dukkha can be translated as suffering, but is more or less meant as “unsatisfactoriness.” Same with tanha – it can be translated as “desire,” but is more akin to the word “longing.”

If I long for something, I want it, and if I cannot have it, then I find my life to be unsatisfactory, or in my direct terms, I suffer. And even if I still do obtain that object that I desired, then I may still be unsatisfied with it, because the only reason I thought it would make me whole in the first place was because I did not have that object. But now that I do, I realize that it didn’t really help me feel any richer or more like myself.

The fact that you want anything at all, that we long for certain things and then are eventually disappointed by them, arises from what Buddhists perceive to be a false sense of self. Insofar as what the “self” is, the “self” is usually what humans think is this unchanging, definable trait that helps others pinpoint exactly who we are. However, Siddhartha disagreed with this. He said there is actually no lasting permanent self – our senses, consciousness, and form are always changing and in flux, never staying the same. For example, you never have the same skin cells – they replace themselves every five years or so. So, in essence, you have a different body. This can be supported just by the simple fact of growing up – people grow taller, they have less bones, they start to lose their hair, etc. Nothing that people usually hold onto as definable or immutable qualities stay constant.

This is where the process of meditation comes in. Meditation as a tool is supposed to help people realize the intensely dynamic and fluid nature of reality and our thoughts. Because our idea of “self” comes from an error in our perception of our world, meditation is a tool Buddhists use to try to approach the world from a more objective/compassionate/fair basis (or what have you). Once we extinguish the idea of a constant self, we are getting rid of the longing/greed/desire that causes suffering in the first place. It’s essentially a shifting of our balance, so to speak. Instead of thinking “This is what I need,” or “I want this because it’s what will help me,” Buddhists try to think in broader terms, relating ourselves back to the world and to each other. Which is one of the major principles of Buddhist philosophy: interdependent co-origination. No living being is separate from another living being; no thing arises independent of anything else. Total and complete connection and change – these are the two main things we can start to observe about the world after we learn to change our perceptions.

Buddhists go deeper and deeper into this type of thinking to get out of the cycle of birth and death (samsara) in order to attain nirvana (trans.: extinction). Most people think nirvana is a blissed-out state, but it’s essentially taking the concept/idea of self and completely rendering it null and void. Once we transcend our selfish and subjective view of the world, we have a more enlightened nature of the world around us. Now, there are two schools of thought as your history teahcher may teach you about: Theravada Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism. Theravada (translated as “Way of the Saints”) is the closest we have to the original form of Buddhism in some ways – they believe in meditating to totally take themselves out of samsara, attain nirvana, and then teach others this “path towards enlightenment.” Mahayana Buddhism is a later form of Buddhism that encapsulates such schools as Zen. Mahayana Buddhists believe that samsara = nirvana, nirvana = samsara. In other words, enlightened nature is not different from the world as we know it in it’s truest sense.

Therefore, the entire goal of Buddhism is to take that life is suffering, which in turn is caused by a sense of desire, and cut off the idea of self (I, me, my) that causes this sense of incompleteness and unsatisfactoriness in the first place. So there is no running from suffering or desire – it’s just that we must cut off the root of it if we do not want to continue suffering.

Q: Do Buddhists think the ONLY way to avoid desire is just to remove “self” entirely?

A:

Your question: Do Buddhists think the only way to avoid desire to just to remove “self” entirely?

Subsequent point related to the question: Appears to be the total removal of all personality and characteristics.

Logical quandary: How can one remove the self?

Answer to the quandary: There is no self to remove.

What we are dealing with here appears to be a logical paradox – Buddhists want to get rid of the notion of self, but insofar as they recognize there is a self to vanquish, they are admitting as to the inherent existence of a self. Which is an argument that people have used in the last two centuries, especially Western philosophers and theologians, to negate Buddhist philosophy. However, Buddhism recognizes life to be inherently paradoxical. The fact that we believe in a self does not in-and-of-itself substantiate the claim of the self, only of our perception and opinion that there is a self – an opinion/perception that is inherently wrong. To negate self is not to negate something that inherently exists, but to negate the perception of it. Think of the notion of a self as a sort of mist/haze that blinds us to the existence, feelings, and lives of other human beings.

This mist/haze that is the idea of self is essentially cogito ergo sum – I think therefore I am. Buddhism can be said to approach cogito ergo sum in two ways: 1) Of course you think and therefore have a sense of self, the self is inherently an idea, and as long as you hold onto the perceptions, thoughts, and emotions we believe define our static notion of self, you will always believe in it and 2) To substantiate your sense of existence inherently on sense is to presuppose that there is actually no permanent self. Only as long as you can interact with a small simulacrum of the world will you ever be able to think you exist; once we stop interacting with the world, there is nothing. And, in it’s paradoxical fashion, Buddhism says no to both of these things, because both of these approaches boil down to what is referred to as solipsism – you can only ever know your self exists and nothing else outside of it.

So, given either interpretation, we are blinded to what Buddhists see as our true nature by stating: 1) Our thoughts create an illusory sense of self because we are overly attached to what they represent and 2) our sensory experience of the world can also be clouded by our perception and attachment to certain phenomena and what we associate with them. In essence, we have to realize that, simply because we see a snowflake as white with our eye, does not mean it is white. Snowflake = white. A = A. Just in the same way, we may see a piece of coal as black. Coal = black. B=B. However, whenever we think of a different animal that may have a larger spectrum of colors they are able to see, then the game changes. Let’s say a bird has a greater range of ultraviolet light able to be absorbed into it’s cornea and can see more colors than a human. To that bird, maybe the snowflake looks black. And all of a sudden, the piece of coal appears to be white. The equation is flipped. Snowflake = black. All of a sudden, A=B.

Which brings us back to the mist/haze of the self. We believe in the concreteness of the self insofar as we believe in the concreteness and absolutism of our experience as an individual being. We see the snowflake as white, therefore it must be truly white. I hold onto these thoughts, feelings, and memories as to who I am, therefore they must make up this person I know as Ryan. In reality, the color of the snowflake and the thoughts-feelings-memories we hold onto are both a type of mist/haze. As long as we are not able to look beyond the limit of our experience, we are thus continually mired in this illusory sense of an unchanging, unmovable self. Whereas all along the self never existed because it was an illusion created by an attachment to our experience of the world and of what makes up our mindstuff (scientific term right there).

This is where the Buddhist concept of sunyata (emptiness) comes into play. As we exist, things are inherently empty and void of any traits that could be said to define things as greater or lesser than the whole. In a way, sunyata has a lot to do with the Christian concept of kenosis (self-emptying). Kenosis is the idea that we have to empty ourselves of the notion of self before we are able to let the divine will as defined b Christian belief have a greater part in our understanding of the world. It is based on the self-emptying of Jesus Christ’s own nature at the Crucifixion – Jesus emptied himself of his divine nature to take on a fully human form (which, if you think about it, is itself a paradox of sorts: a man at once both fully human and fully divine. It would technically be considered impossible. Luckily, the faith tradition of Catholicism you participate in does have a lot more to say about this). Even in this sense, there is not a complete sense of self Jesus Christ himself has to hold onto – if his nature is fully divine as well as fully human, not only is he participating in his own pain as an individual person, but he is also participating in the drama of the universe as it continually unfolds and folds back upon itself – for if the divine is eternal, it would have to be even beyond a sense of self because it is beyond the phenomenal constraints of our universe.

Both sunyata and kenosis make one thing clear: our idea of self-nature and of true nature are beyond a rational sort of thinking. This is where the Zen Buddhist tradition of the koan comes into play (we can talk more about that later). But, to wrap it up nicely, both of these ideas find their middle ground in theologia negativa or negative theology. The best thing you can do to picture negative theology is to imagine a stained glass window with an image on it. The image is colorful and pretty and depicts a scene from a story, but it is not the actual nature of the stained glass window. So to better understand what the window is, you start to pick apart the painting that makes up the stained glass window. Bit by bit, you are left with nothing but a clear window with a bright light coming through it and reflected by it. And that’s what we are looking for by discarding the notion of self, of I-my-me – the bright light that is the truth behind the picture and the story it depicts.

Shobogenzo & 100% Authentic Truth: On Dogen’s Fukanzazengi & Makahannyaharamitsu

The myriad differences
Resolved by sitting,
All doors opened.
In this still place,
I follow my nature,
Be what it may. – Reizan

Let’s Try This Again 

Two years ago I wrote an analysis of Dogen’s Zenki (tr. The Whole Works) chapter of his seminal masterpiece Shobogenzo (tr. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye) with the intention of writing further analyses down the road. Then some things called “a job” and “marriage” and “home ownership” happened, and boy, does that take time away from still pretending like you can do nothing but write articles all the time. However, since today is my last day of summer break before going back to teaching for the 2018-2019 school year, I thought I would give it a crack at writing an analysis of some of Dogen’s lighter fare before I have to be surrounded by teenagers for three months.

Before We Even Analyze…

The last analysis I wrote had a section on the differences between how we understand the nature of philosophy in the West versus the East, mostly from the academic standpoint. This time, I want to make it clear that the translations we use are also important. Shobogenzo is a classical text that was lost to the public for centuries – it was circulated in internal Buddhist circles by and for those who thought they had put in the necessary rigor of practice to understand the text. Only in the late 19th century, as the text was rediscovered and “Religious Studies” and “Oriental Studies” were becoming rigorous academic disciplines, was there even an attempt by lay people to understand, analyze, and communicate the text.

Does this all sound boring to you yet? If so, good, you’re a sane person who likes doing normal person things, unlike me. However, if you’re like me and are interested in studying Buddhism, this kind of information is important to keep in the back of your brain – if you’re a person in a city that does not happen to have a large Buddhist presence, you are going to come to know the philosophy and teachings of Buddhism, it will be primarily through the texts. And if you want a decent understanding, you better get your hands on  decent text.

The Shobogenzo, depending on what translation you are reading, can seem like a mish-mash of philosophical jibber jabber or some of the most profound spiritual/intellectual teachings from the other end of the Pacific Ocean. So, instead of making you wonder where the hell I am getting this all from, here are a list of the most accessible translations you can find of Dogen’s master text:

1. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo – Kazuaki Tanahashi (the big book you may see in most Soto Zen monasteries and zen centers in the States)

2. Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo Series – Gudo Nishijima & Chodo Cross (one of the more definitive translations out there)

3. Shobogenzo: The Treasure House of the Eye of the True Teaching: A Trainee’s Translation of Great Master Dogen’s Spiritual Masterpiece – Rev. Hubert Nearman, O.B.C. (a free translation in PDF format by the Shasta Abbey – just in case you don’t want to pay for it)

4. Shobogenzo: Zen Essays by Dogen – Thomas Cleary (a translation of thirteen of the more seminal chapters of Dogen’s work – if you want an hope of studying the Shobogenzo during a bus ride to and from work, this is the book you buy).

Be my guest and take your pick – any four of these translations holds the spirit of the text as best as they can given the strains of translating Classical Japanese into English. And in analyses such as our own, it’s important to know we are using a reliable translation, or at least one reliable enough to be used in a college textbook. With all that said, we will be using translations by Thomas Cleary from Shobogenzo: Zen Essays by Dogen and Yuho Yokoi from the Zen Sourcebook traditionally used in college classrooms. In any future analyses, these are most likely the two guys whose translations I will be using. Plus, Fukanzazengi is not the only chapter we are using for this article today, but also Dogen’s Makahannyaharamitsu (Great Transcendent Wisdom) chapter from Shobogenzo as well. Since both chapters are so succint, but somewhat tie into each other, it will help shed more light on Dogen’s take on the importance of meditation to Buddhist practice. Now, without further ado…

Dogen’s Five-Star Yelp Review on Meditation

That’s not the actual translation of the term Fukanzazengi, but it could be. What it actually means is A Universal Recommendation for Zazen. Zazen is the term used most often in Japanese Zen Buddhist communities to describe the act of sitting meditation. It literally means “sitting meditation.” But there is a difference between meditating the way you may in a yoga class or in a Taoist circle somewhere on a college campus, and the way you do seating meditation in a zen center. For Dogen, zazen was more than just meditation. It was the act of enlightenment itself shining through the individual practitioner. Dogen, and Buddhists in general, adhere to the principle of non-duality, and therefore interconnectedness.

These two ideas culminate in the concept of interdependent co-origination. This term, to sum it up here as best as possible means that all arise, and are no separate from, each other. You arise from your parent, and your child arises from you, the same way a table may rise after carving a tree, and in the end, maybe your child will one day set a drink on that table the tree has become. Not only is everything connected, but their mutual creation and existence are inherently intertwined and a major part of the fabric of the universe.  By realizing this, we learn to accept that things are also not put into neat categories or separated from each other as easily as we may believe. “Ordinary People” and “Buddhas” are not two different things. In fact, they are the same thing. This nonduality, this interconnectedness regarding the conceptual frameworks in how we see ourselves and others is at the heart of zazen.

Ordinary People = Enlightened People

Enlightened People = Ordinary People

That’s Buddhist math, for you. Now, you may ask, where is zazen in that equation? Well, zazen itself is the equal sign. As Dogen himself said in Fukanzazengi:

Zen is not “step-by-step” meditation. Rather it is simply the easy and pleasant practice of a Buddha, the realization of the Buddha’s Wisdom. The Truth appears, there being no delusion. If you understand this, you are completely free, like a dragon that has obtained water or a tiger that reclines on a mountain. The supreme Law will then appear of itself, and you will be free of weariness of confusion. 

In the eyes of Dogen, to practice meditation is inherently the quality of an awakened being. If you had not been able to see your own Buddha nature in the first place, you would not have even started doing zazen in the first place. There is nothing to attain to or work towards because, due to the sheer fact of you existing in that very moment within the state of zazen, means you have attained the supposedly unattainable. As the last Bodhisattva vow states in Zen Buddhism: The Buddha way is inconceivable; I vow to attain it. The fact you are meditating while there are others that may seem much wiser and more put together than you does not mean you are somehow deficient. Earlier in Fukanzazengi, Dogen has this to say to that very thought possibly arising in your mind:

You should pay attention to the fact that even the Buddha Shakyamuni had to practice zazen for six years. It is also said that Bodhidharma had to do zazen at Shao-lin Temple for nine years in order to transmit the Buddha-mind. Since these ancient sages were so diligent, how can present-day trainees do without the practice of zazen? You should stop pursuing words and letters and learn to withdraw and reflect on yourself. 

The practice of the art of zazen does not mean we are deficient in our buddha-nature, but that we are learning how to fully embody it and realize it is there. Because it is by our own nature we forget we are enlightened and awakened beings in the first place. That is how we fall into delusion and craving. We believe there is something missing from us that needs to be filled either with expensive and fancy gadgets, with people, or even with drugs and alcohol. But that’s not true at all. You are already 100% Buddha because you are already 100% yourself. However, as Dogen pointed out, just like for Siddhartha and Bodhidharma, it’s going to take work to realize the 100% authentic truth we all are.

Dogen Thinks Wisdom is Dope

Wisdom is a big deal in all religious traditions – it is seen as that which is greater than any other type of intelligence, emotional or rational. Wisdom allows us to see things as they are, intuit as to the nature of the world and the actions of individuals, and may even give us a small glimpse into the infinitude of the divine if we are able to grasp the deeper knowledge of both texts and faithfulness. In certain religious and philosophical terms then, wisdom is in-and-of-itself the ideal. A quality or essence we can only grasp by learning not only the truth of human nature but that which we were attempting to grasp in the first place. But, as with all things cryptic and mystical, wisdom is not what we may at first believe it to be. This is where we get to the Socratic Paradox (yell that in your heads for added affect). While Socrates himself may have never said the words, what we gather from the writings of Plato is that, after constant searching, questioning, and debating, those who employ the Socratic method of philosophical inquiry are bound to come to the ultimate conclusion that I know that all I know is that I do not know anything.

Dogen just so happens to agree with the Socratic Paradox in his Makahannyaharamitsu chapter:

The time when the Independent Seer practices profound transcendent wisdom is the whole body’s clear vision that the five clusters are all empty. The five clusters are physical form, sensations, perceptions, conditionings, and consciousness. They are five layers of wisdom. Clear vision is wisdom. In expounding and manifesting this fundamental message, we would say form is empty, emptiness is form, form is form, emptiness is emptiness. It is the hundred grasses, it is myriad forms. 

As for the present monk’s thinking to himself, where all phenomena are respected, wisdom which still has no origination or extinction is paying obeisance. Precisely at the time of their obeisance, accordingly wisdom with available faculties has become manifest: that is what is referred to as precepts, meditation, wisdom, and so on, up to the liberation of living beings. This is called nothing. The facilities of nothing are available in this way. This is transcendent wisdom which is most profound, extremely subtle, and hard to fathom. 

When the monk or Buddhist practitioner realizes that wisdom is something to be obtained towards and pays respect and deference to it in the form of the Three Jewels (Buddha, Dharma, Sangha), then wisdom manifests itself. Wisdom is known in its conceptual and intellectual foundation as a thing. Through enough practice and insight into our original nature – that “100% authentic truth” I mentioned earlier – we start to realize wisdom has no inherent nature. In the same way in which we have no inherent nature. The five clusters/layers described in the passage – physical form, sensations, perceptions, conditionings, and consciousness – they are what we believe to comprise our true self. But we are not what we taste, touch, and feel. The “100% authentic truth” goes beyond the sensations we have that are all too willing to deceive us.

Clear vision is the only true faculty of wisdom Dogen knows we can aptly apply to it in our lifetimes. Especially through Buddhist practice. As Dogen essentially says later in the chapter, “The only way you even know wisdom is a thing is because you have the precepts, meditation, and metaphors of wisdom we talk about here in Zen Buddhism.” But wisdom does not exist because those things exist – wisdom is already there! Just as buddha nature is our ordinary nature, wisdom is inherently there in all aspects of the practice. Buddhist practice – and by extension wisdom in all of its varied forms – is the actualization of what you have always had inside you but doubted was there because either you or someone or something else told you it was not there in the first place. And to realize it, we need to learn to see it in every other aspect of our lives and the world – the hundred grasses/myriad forms Dogen points out.

One is All, All is One

Dogen starts to wrap up Fukanzazengi with one of the few succint statements of his eternally present nondualistic thinking patterns:

Zazen is a practice beyond the subjective and objective worlds, beyond discriminating thinking. Therefore, no distinction should be made between the clever and the stupid. To practice the way singleheartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment or zazen and daily life. 

If we think we know a lot, and start to examine those aspects of life we are not that knowledgeable about, we end up learning in the end we did not know as much as we think we did. Therefore, who is truly clever and truly stupid? If wisdom is something we can manifest through the different types of practice and discipline, then why are we looking outside ourselves for wisdom when it was there all along, in our day-to-day lives? Practicing the constant internal investigation that zazen is gives us the tools necessary to go beyond our opinions and notions of right and wrong, what is and what is not, and start to see the world with clear vision for the first time. Only when we have such clear vision, the essence of wisdom inherently within our “100% authentic truth,” can we start to see there is no division at all.

Zazen isn’t just meditation, it’s the here and now. It’s our unobstructed buddha-nature expressing itself effortlessly in every precious moment of this life.

Don’t know; just go straight. – Zen Master Seung Sahn

A Teaching Anniversary: Being a Teacher of Hope in an Era of Decline

“My discourse is a discourse of tolerance. It’s a discourse that, because it is tolerant, defends unity in diversity. This means that it is no longer possible for us to be separated…just because it is in the interests of imperialism that we should be separated. We must overcome the power of the ruling classes who also don’t want to see us united, so that they can exploit us more effectively. We must go beyond differences in order to gain, create, and invent a unity that is necessary and indispensable. I would suggest to you that unity in diversity is something that is invented politically. It doesn’t exist as a spontaneous phenomenon. It exists only as a created phenomenon; it is invented and therefore a political act, an act of political decision, in which its leaders must turn it into a pedagogical object, by which I mean they should debate what unity in diversity means with groups representing the people whenever possible.” – Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Commitment, p. 80

The seventeenth day of October signifies two important steps for me at this moment in my life. First, it is the two month anniversary of my wedding day – a step into adulthood that requires of a person a commitment and promise that transcends even the vaguest notion of self and/or ego. Secondly, it marks the year since I began my job as a real (real in this sense meaning PAID) teacher after about three years of tutoring, studying, and practicing beforehand. Since I started to teach in an official capacity, I’ve felt myself growing and responding with and in tandem with the world and people in a way that I would not have thought possible before I became a teacher. Not only have I had the opportunity to be surrounded by master educators and people dedicated to a craft, in a nation that does not have enough respect for it, but I have found myself encountering events and students that have fundamentally changed both my professional and spiritual vision.

The Illness

However, my first year of teaching has come at a time of disheveled public discourse and political ignominy. The election of a proto-fascist anti-intellectual that preyed off of the ignorance and ill-informed fears of people of various classes who are not easily swayed by the messages of Christian humility they so often affirm that they believe in has left us at a crossroads. The United States of America is, for not the first time, reaping the karma of its very grave sins and stupidity. While the majority of the electorate did not actually vote for Trump, it is telling that said majority is not actually a majority in any real way that corresponds to the objective definition. 

Most of us stayed home.

We sat on our couches. We were shocked. We could not believe it.

We let it happen.

So what do you do to make sure it does not happen again?

The Diagnosis

A year into teaching and more than a year out of graduate school, I am more than ever aware of teaching as a science, one of precision and growth. While every teacher knows that a student is more than their standardized test scores and grade percentages, you need to know where students are in terms of their progress and growth. Insofar as students embody unawakened intellectual potential, they are also in a vulnerable place in the process of becoming who they are – exposed nerves within a system that is meant to educate them and raise them up, not ensconce them within a repetitive cycle of behavior. This is less the fault of their individual communities and an endemic aspect of post-industrial, commercial society.  Our political process is the prime example of the post-modern melancholic feeling of helplessness that we have become accustomed to expect from our culture. As Paul Goodman recognized in his 1960 book Growing Up Absurd:

“These groups of ‘[disaffected youth] are not small, and they will grow larger. Certainly they are suffering. Demonstrably they are not getting enough out of our wealth and civilization. They are failing to assimilate much of the culture. As was predictable, most of the authorities and all of the public spokesmen explain it by saying there has been a failure of socialization. They say that the background conditions have interrupted socialization and must be improved. And, not enough effort has been made to guarantee belonging, there must be better bait or punishment.  But perhaps there has not been a failure to communicate. Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the [youth  and it is] unacceptable.”

If this is true and for almost sixty years we have only judged our students by what they can do for society in order to “guarantee belonging,” then we have failed. This definition of personhood is less defined by sheer humanity and more by capitalistic measure. That we are only ever as good as the money we make and the work that we do. A message such as this is nihilistic – a denial of personhood. If I am not contributing or putting in my fair share, then clearly I am not working hard enough and am lazy. My panic attack is my own fault – why can’t I just get it together? If I committed a crime, then clearly I am the one that has done a disservice to society and not the other way around.

If this is what our young people think of themselves, then indeed Paul Goodman was right – American society has not failed to communicate it’s message.

The Cure

However, there is a different message. One that is a radical affirmation of personhood and being, of meaning that is inherent because it is meaningful to be alive and be me instead of what I contribute. As a teacher, I am here to help you find this meaning because I (and you, and you there, and you here) knows what it is like to feel directionless and lost. That you need to find your purpose, because believe it or not, you do have a purpose, and once you find it, then you will be more than what you contribute to the world and more than what you spend on the next stupid iPhone that is only moderately better than the previous one you had. If I am able to make you open your ears and eyes and turn pages and read articles, then you may realize there is a whole world out there for you to explore, and that once you have the knowledge you need to earn that diploma, then you can go out and be your own master no matter where you travel or decide to plant roots.

In times like these of disaffection and seeming defeat, those who are involved in education realize that it is not simply a science of precision and growth – education is about embodying a certain art of transformation. We teach subject matter and facts not to simply fill a quota, but to radically change ideas and attitudes people hold about themselves and the world. Change itself is slow and methodical, a process and not an event. The discussions we hold with students and the papers we assign them to write may not have the intended effect today or tomorrow, but the possibility always exists when the seed is planted. And that is what the type of change educators intend to bring about, that of possibility. The possibility to make the world a better place, to be a more involved member of a community, to share some kindness or idea that can spread like wildfire to inspire people.

We must realize that it is not our students who will fail us, but it is the attitude and disposition our society has left them with that has engendered failure. This is the great shame we collectively bear as a nation. We care more about what our students and potential generations embody in terms of their marketability and “brand power” (a phrase I will 110% punch someone in the face for if they ever use it in a conversation with me). In this way, the sheer act and practice of learning is a bulwark against the oppressive quality of our current societal discourse and the need to make our students feel they are only ever valuable in terms of what they are able to put in to society and then give back to it within the realm of their buying power.

The color of our skins does not matter – there is literally no biological basis for race. The places and experiences we grow up and have there may make us who we are and create a wall between us and the world if we let it, but in the end, we must recognize that we are all human, and as humans, we all share the quality of suffering. Look past the biases and trauma while recognizing it is important for educators to do because it not only affirms the individuality of our students, but also the truths they embody. For we all embody truth, a “divine spark” of some sort. We will have to do our best to create the appropriate conditions for students to realize this within themselves by being compassionate while also having high standards. To be stern while also kind. The job of being a teacher means helping students find a certain balance within themselves, a gift they may not have realized they had there all along. The only way this can be done is through change. Change will be slow, and it will not always seem victorious. But change for the better, that transformation of a student into an adult and hopefully a fully realized person will create one more vehicle for love and compassion in the world that was not there before.

That may be hard to see as a possibility right at this very moment, when events seem so dark and depressing. When you fight tooth and nail every day to get students to pick their heads up and give a shit in your class. You have to have hope though.

Teaching is the art of hope.

“I am not hopeful on a whim, but rather out of conditioning dictated by my human nature. It is not possible to live fully as a human being without hope. Hold on to hope.” – Paulo Freire

 

Shobogenzo & Zenki: Dogen on Life and Death

Now that we have introduced our audience to the basics of what Zen may entail for the practitioner, we will dive right into one of the greatest minds Japanese Buddhism has to offer – Dogen Zenji (1200-1253). While Buddhist philosophy is dense, hopefully this exposure to Dogen and commentary on a single chapter of his magnum opus, Shobogenzo, will encourage those who read this not to be deterred if they ever encounter Buddhist philosophy in the future.

The Master

Dogen Zenji is the founder of the Japanese Soto school of Zen Buddhism, and one of the greatest philosophical minds to come out of Japan and the Zen tradition. Rehabilitating the Japanese Zen tradition after it was subsumed by the larger and more influential Tendai school of thought, Dogen traveled all the way to China to relearn Zen as it was practiced before being diluted by more esoteric schools of thought. China is the place where Dogen believed he would find Zen in its purest form.

From there, the rest tends to become history as they say. He returned to Japan, and immediately found push back from the Tendai religious authorities in the capital. In response, Dogen relocated his Soto school to Fukui Prefecture, where he established his first temple, Eihei-ji (Eternal Peace), then known as Sanshoho Daibutsuji (a possible reference to the four Buddhist guardians who used to protect the temple). At this place of residence he trained monks and wrote down the rules and philosophy for his school in the Eihei Koroku and Shobogenzo. Of these two texts, the latter has had the more definitive impact on Japanese and Western Zen.

The difficult part about explaining the Shobogenzo is that the Shobogenzo is difficult to explain in the first place. An altogether comprehensive document, the Shobogenzo is a cumulative and exhaustive synthesis of the ideas and teachings of a single Zen master over a lifetime of arduous work and introspection. On one level, it is simply another clandestine philosophical document in a long line of great Mahayana (“Great Vehicle”) Buddhist philosophy hearkening back to the Zen roots of Yogacara and Madhyamika thought.  On another level, the Shobogenzo is to Japanese and Buddhist philosophy what Hegel’s philosophy of phenomenology was to Existentialism and the Berlin school of thought – both redefining and definitive in many aspects.

Dogen was able to explain in the Shobogenzo what some Zen Masters had been teaching wordlessly to their students for centuries. As a document, it continues to be an expression of concepts and views that may have otherwise been lost over the eight hundred years that have passed since Dogen wrote it during the duration of his brief time in this world. Just as Hakuin, Ryokan, Kukai, and Ikkyu sought to recapture the spirit of Buddhism in Japan through their works, so Dogen sought to solidify the spirit of Zen he had found  in China for generations to come. And the funny part of this is that Dogen’s insight into the predicament that would befall later generations actually had some truth to it. High Buddhist Philosophy in Dogen’s own Soto school would fall to the wayside. When his work was found again in the nineteenth century, it brought philosophical thought back to the forefront of modern Japanese Zen.

The Shobogenzo was a much more esoteric text than it is today. Written in the classical Japanese language and calligraphy of the Kamakura Jidai (1185-1333), most Zen monks of the Soto school forgot how to read the text altogether. This issue was only compounded by Soto Zen’s turn to the more mystical Buddhist philosophy of one of Dogen’s successors, Keizan Jokin (1268-1325). Due to these and other internal issues, the text was lost until the nineteenth century, when Japanese scholars and Orientalists rediscovered the text and translated it into modern Japanese and then into other various languages. The rediscovery of the Shobogenzo led to a burgeoning interest in Dogen’s Soto philosophy among Japanese Buddhists and academics and eventually Western practitioners as well, though it would take them a while to get to a point of familiarity with Zen to even broach the Shobogenzo.

Even after all this talk about the Shobogenzo, it’s historical origins and implications, you probably are left wondering about it. If this text is so important to philosophy and Buddhist thought, then, as a possible philosophy major or Buddhist who is reading this article, why have you never heard of it? There are two immediate answers to that:

1. Western philosophy has had a tendency to focus on analytic philosophy for the last three decades, even ignoring their own traditions found within Continental philosophy. This alone is damaging enough to Western philosophy and its survival within the popular mindset.
2. Western Buddhism does not tend to hit upon the larger philosophical topics and authors of the religion, such as that of shunyata (emptiness) and Nagarjuna. This is due to Western Buddhism’s inordinate attention on mindfulness and self-help. In my opinion, this has cost Western Buddhism the respect of those interested in philosophy and has brought about a great deal of reliance on ceremonialism, clericalism, and even worse, pseudo-buddhism. Meditation is the root of Buddhist practice and is an important part of the philosophy of the Buddha himself, but familiarity with Buddhist thought has to be ingrained in the Western community if it seeks to continue for generations to come.

As a person who grew up Catholic, many people find it difficult to ultimately leave behind the ideas and ideals of Catholicism because of the ingrained philosophical tradition that exists within that religion. Just as Catholics become familiar with their own philosophy, Buddhists need to know their own traditions and ideas if they are to pass on a living, breathing tradition that continues to edify and enervate the Western mind. It is for this sake that I am starting this series of commentaries on the Shobogenzo. Others have come before (shout-out to Brad Warner), but the number is few and there need to be those who continue the tradition of engaging with these texts so as to transmit the message to the next generation. Zen may be a tradition of wordless transmission, but it is through the medium of word that man continues to engage with his world. So, for the sake of engaging with the world and engaging with the Shobogenzo, the first of hopefully many “Zen Millenial Shobogenzo Commentaries” is underway.

Dogen’s Shobogenzo: Zenki Commentary

First off, I am by no means an expert on the Shobogenzo. I have not dedicated my “entire life” to studying it because I haven’t lived much of life yet and there are many more things I want to do other than read the works of one, singular person. I write as a spiritual practitioner and everyday person writing for spiritual practitioners and everyday people. My commentary and essays are informed by personal experiences and thoughts and insights I have meditated on.

In the Zenki, there is a passage we can isolate to get to the heart of what Dogen is attempting to tell us:

“The Great Path of the Buddhas, in its consummation, is passage to freedom, is actualization. That passage to freedom, in one sense, is that life passes through life to freedom, and death too passes through death to freedom. Therefore, there is leaving life and death, there is entering life and death; both are the Great Path of consummation. There is abandoning life and death, there is crossing over life and death; both are the Great Path of consummation.

Actualization is life, life is actualization. When that actualization is taking place, it is without exception the complete actualization of life, it is the complete actualization of death. This pivotal working can cause life and cause death. At the precise moment of the actualization of this working, it is not necessarily great, not necessarily small, not all-pervasive, not limited, not extensive, not brief.

The present life is in this working, this working is in the present life. Life is not coming, not going, not present, not becoming. Nevertheless, life is the manifestation of the whole works, death is the manifestation of the whole works. Know that among the infinite things in oneself, there is life and there is death. One should calmly think: is this present life, along with the myriad things concomitant with life, together with life or not? There is nothing at all, not so much as one time or one phenomenon, that is not together with life. Even be it a single thing, a single mind, none is not together with life.”

What Dogen is proposing is nothing if not revolutionary in a way: life does not happen without something to do the living.

1. Life & Death

What are the implications of this view?

Was there not life when the Big Bang occurred? Did not the smallest molecules an single-celled organisms live?

Were not the dinosaurs alive in a more ferocious manner than we could ever fathom?

What is it that makes our experience and relation to life any more pronounced and extraordinary than for those creatures who came before us?

The answer to these questions is that, yes, beings and creatures other than humans have lived and will continue to live, but it is our conscious act of living that gives life that quality of consciousness in the first place. Our actions and being are a part of what defines the use and nature of time and space. Our mere existing is actualized buddhahood, because to awake ourselves to a sense of being, to a sense of “The Now,” is to be fully immersed in all the threads of action and intent that have brought us to this very moment. This leads into one of Dogen’s more radical conceptualizations: being-time.

There is a lot that goes into the concept of being-time, but for now, let us interpret it as the fact that there is no time or moment without something there experiencing the time or moment. If it was not for the quality of something being in the first place, there would be no sense of time that we could hold onto in the way we may experience it every day. Hence, “actualization is life, life is actualization.” Only in the presence of life , and death, can time and moment take on form and action.

Which brings me to an earlier part in the passage:

“…life passes through life to freedom, and death too passes through death to freedom. Therefore, there is leaving life and death, there is entering life and death…”

As I pointed out in my earlier essay, there is a way of looking at Zen as “the great work of life and death.” These words and what they mean to us – life and death – carry a lot of weight within Buddhist doctrine. In looking at this aspect of Dogen’s Zenki, we may want to pay mind to the Mahayana Buddhist philosophy spelled out in the brief Heart Sutra:

“All things are empty:
Nothing is born, nothing dies,
nothing is pure, nothing is stained,
nothing increases and nothing decreases.”

Pay close attention to the second line of this passage from the Heart Sutra. “Nothing is born, nothing dies” – surely this must be a mistake. We see things come into this world of existence and depart from it all the time. What do Buddhists mean when they say they believe nothing is born and nothing dies? Life cannot be non-life, and death cannot be non-death. Out of all the assurances we have in this world, it is that we come into it alone and we leave this world alone. However, ask yourself – what is it that perishes? Do you perish? Does the Jeffery, or Miranda, or Gerald that people knew, is that what perishes?

Or does this concept we have of a static, unchanging self at the center of constantly changing phenomena have a flaw in it somewhere?

When Dogen says “life passes through life to freedom” and “death passes through death to freedom,” these are not simple statements admonishing us to live a good life or to die like a hero. Instead, it asks us to go a step further and realize the thin boundary between what we view as definite states of existence and non-existence may be fuzzier than we had imagined before. In fact, the boundary we thought existed between these two states may not exist in the way we imagine it at all. When we live, we have to contrast it with the extreme opposite that we think of, and that is death. However, death itself is simply a consequence of being alive, and guess what, being both lifeless and deathless was the antecedent to our lives as we currently live them. What Dogen, and Buddhist philosophy in general, is trying to make us see is that the labels we put on ephemeral states do not make the states themselves any more lasting or concrete. They are simply one among many types of states of being in this universe that come and go. To be free, we must live a life not beholden to the concept of life, just as we should not die beholden to the concept of death. While Zen strips our consciousness down to the basics – which life and death are – it also makes us go one step further. To peer over the cliff into the vast expanse below to glimpse what we were too afraid to look at before. Zen makes us look at what may lie beyond life and death. Just as it says at the end of the Heart Sutra:

“Gone,
gone,
gone over,
gone fully over.
Awakened!
So be it!”

2. “The Whole Works” 

The word Zenki itself is a Japanese term meaning “the whole works.” In this sense, talking about life and death for Dogen is not a morbid subject, but a discussion of all that Buddhist practice encompasses and reveals through the quieting of the mind and working through the illusion we have set up for ourselves. When we talk about the whole works, we want to refer to a passage from earlier:

“The present life is in this working, this working is in the present life. Life is not coming, not going, not present, not becoming. Nevertheless, life is the manifestation of the whole works, death is the manifestation of the whole works. Know that among the infinite things in oneself, there is life and there is death.”

To build on it, here are two other sections from later in Zenki:

“…the principle of in life the whole works appears has nothing to do with beginning and end; though it is the whole earth and all space, not only does it not block the appearance of the whole works in life, it doesn’t block the appearance of the whole works in death either. When the whole works appears in death, though it is the whole earth and all space, not only does it not block the appearance of the whole works in death, it doesn’t block the appearance of the whole works in life either. For this reason, life doesn’t obstruct death, death doesn’t obstruct life.”

“In the manifestation of the whole works these is life and there is death.”

When we look at these passages as a whole, not only do you the reader now have a practically complete picture of Zenki in Dogen’s Shoogenzo, but you have access to a critical core tenet of a Buddhist understanding of the world: interdependence. Interdependence is a nifty way of saying that all things are united, but instead of simply being united, they are formed because of the interaction of these forces in the world, and contain a bit of each other as well. If that sounds Taoist to you, well then, congratulations, because Taoism is in Zen’s DNA from it’s days as Ch’an in China. Just as there is yang in yin, and vice versa, in the Tao, each thing in the universe contains its opposite.

This may seem odd to us:

“Does peace contain war?”

“Does a dog have a part of a cat?”

“Does vanilla ice cream have a part of chocolate ice cream in it?”

Dogen is not making this point by accident. The issue may have been just as difficult for his students to grasp eight hundred years ago as it is for us today. When he points out that life does not obstruct death, death does not obstruct life, and that the whole works exists in both, he is showing that interdependence is not a viewpoint that settles for simplistic notions of one thing literally being within another. What interdependence makes us realize is that we are in a complicated relationship with our surroundings. Just as a mother and father take care of the child, so do the sun, rain, trees, and ground take care of us by providing us nourishment and new life. The crux of interdependence is all things are intimately connected. All things are in relation to another. If this is true, where do I begin and the other thing/being end?

In answering this question, we see interdependence naturally seeps into the philosophy of shunyata, or emptiness. Emptiness, in the Buddhist sense, has a lot in common with the Buddha’s conceptual model of anatman (non-self). Interdependence and emptiness, as Buddhism largely does, puts aside the notion of self. This “self” we believe in is a construct of our opinions, views, knowledge, and more. The life we are currently living is predicated on the notion that there is some thing that is actually there to experience itself, and the world around it, this whole time. If we have the courage to let go of this sense of self, this “ego-I,” then we penetrate into a deeper truth – the stuff behind the self. The mishmash of threads and circumstances that have brought us to this particular body, in this particular time, in this particular place, on this particular day. Once we are privy to these aspects of self, of what has come together to make this self, we see these particularities and pick them apart, thread by thread. When the threads that made you up have unraveled, what is left of what is it that we are? For many, this is where Zen practice starts.

However, Dogen is also attempting to say something else through his Zenki chapter as well. That is, while the idea of self is illusory and ill-advised, being itself is something that is actually there. While there is no self that may be there, in the end, we continue to be. All the people we have been and all the people we have met; all the situations and events of our life; all the books we have read and experience we have gained – all of these things are caught up in one another. There is no separation between any of it. While our idea of who we are and how we continue to live and die may be revolutionized, we continue to be and never stop being. Everything that has ever been and ever will be – that is contained in us. It is contained in the universe. You are the universe. Dogen is asking you: How does it feel to be the universe, to be the whole works?

Well, go on – how does it feel?

The Shobogenzo translation that was used for this essay was from Thomas Cleary’s book, “Shobogenzo: Zen Essays by Dogen (1986)”