Back to the mystery, spirit and understanding of our school I have another Dōgen piece to bring up and a gift for you. We'd made some little change in our chant books and these pretty recent ones are surplus now, so I thought you might enjoy them. Yesterday's piece Fukanzazengi is in here as it today's piece Genjo Koan. I hope having the text I'm sharing about in front of you is helpful but there's a little danger of being distracted with a book in front of you so keep them closed for now please.
Sometimes teachers use a whole lecture just explaining the title of this one as it's a kind of word play and encouragment to us, they'll break down each of 4 Chinese characters that make those sounds gen-jo ko-an and give all kinds of back story. For time I shall refrain myself! But basically it means the koan of everyday life. The way every moment is a complete teaching of awakening.
This one was written just a few years later than Fukanzazengi. In 2033 when Dōgen was 33 and has just opened his first monastery, Koshoji in Fukakusa just south of Kyoto which was then the imperial capital of Heiankyo. This area is now a suburb of Kyoto and the original monastery is gone.
Genjo Koan appears to have started out as a letter to a lay supporter which Dōgen probably edited more later for inclusion in his masterwork Shobogenzo, "The True Treasury of the Dharma Eye" - a collection of somewhere between 75 and 100 essays on the Dharma. And he put this one first which underlines it's importance to him most likely.
It starts out again encouraging us not to be caught in the relative world of conditions and problems or in the absolute world beyond conditions. The logic is a little hard to tease out her but the meaning I think is clear this is on page 24:
As all things are buddha dharma, there is delusion, realization, practice, birth and death, buddhas and sentient beings. As myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death. The buddha way, in essence, is leaping clear of abundance and lack; thus there is birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas.
With these more philosophical works of Dōgen it can be better to feel more than think. Especially feel into that big about leaping clear. How does that show up in your body-heart-mind?
As all things are buddha dharma, there is delusion, realization, practice, birth and death, buddhas and sentient beings. As myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death. The buddha way, in essence, is leaping clear of abundance and lack; thus there is birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas.
The head part here is using the example of whether we are broken people who hope to become Buddhas one day or if we are already Buddhas and always have been, it's just we are a little rusty on how to express and live that. Oh my I've been suffering and confused all this time and I just remembered I'm a Buddha and everything's ok!
And we might think as people who are somewhat convinced that we're broken people trying to get better than either the practice will fix us, or there's some kind of work around where we just have to believe hard enough that we're already fixed which is actually another way of hoping the practice will fix us. Dōgen says drop all that. Leap clear. Sometimes the language of affirmation and denail and neither is used: you are Buddha, you are sentient being. You are not Buddha, you are not sentience being. You are Buddha and sentient being. you are neigther Buddha nor sentient being. A kind of language that leaves us no where to stand conceptually. Sometimes I think about this kind of stuff as a kind of yoga for our minds. Stretching and bending us to help us release the limitations of our usually way of thinking. And sure that can be frustrating to the mind - of course! So leap clear of the whole thing. Drop it. Take the next breath realizing everything you just thought of is now the past and completely gone. Poof!
In this translation the last line of that paragraph is a new topic so I don't know what it's not it's own paragraph but it's a good one for us:
Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.
That needs little explanation and much practice. A powerful expression of impermanance and our usual unskillful relationship to it. That would be a wonderful phrase to just breathe with: "in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread." And to notice that often when you're unhappy about something it's described by this. What am I clinging to as I watch it fall away? My relationship with someone? My identity? A physical ability I used to have? And what is it I'm averse to, don't want to be here? And how does that aversion fertilize the weeds in my mind? How do I dig in and keep those rumination loops going.
Then a few paragraphs on how hard it is to realize any of this with our conscious minds. Another way of talking about "think not thinking, nonthinking" perhaps.
Let's jump to the bottom of the page, this is possibly the most famous saying of Dōgen's:
To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.
Another one we could practice for a lifetime and bring up daily. Maybe also a kind of bridge for us to cross between broken person and Buddha: to study the way is to study the self, sure that makes sense, to study the self is to forget the self, wahh!?! But I'm stuck on this self, this is me, it may not be perfect or always what I wanted, but it's me - I don't want to forget it, it's too frightening to forget it too. What would be left?
Doesn't that make you think about that part of you that's attached to your particular brand of suffering and confusion? That kind of inner bratty child? The one who digs in and would rather be right than happy? That one. As we see and get to know that one maybe forgetting ourself becomes a little more appealing or at least imaginable.
It's a huge trust leap too. Have you every had anything to do with the team building exercises called ropes courses? There's a neat exercise in there in the simpler "low ropes" ones where you stand on the edge of a picnic table with you back to the edge and your friends are below you with their arms out. The challenge is to let yourself fall backwards and trust that they will catch you gently and lovingly. It's surprisingly hard to do and surprisingly wonderful when you're caught. So these teachings are like that, let the Buddhas and ancestors catch you. And it's hard to do!
Dōgen does encourage us a with this prediction on the bottom of p 24 into p 25:
To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains, and this no-trace continues endlessly.
The next paragraph is also very accessible and wonderful:
When you first seek dharma, you imagine you are far away from its environs. At the moment when dharma is authentically transmitted, you are immediately your original self.
When we start our practice we are probably intrigued and curious and maybe a little weary of all of this - I mean all that bowing and chanting and the teachers seem to be into religious cosplay - and for sure you don't feel like a Buddha. Early in practice so much self doubt, so much comparing mind - everyone else seems so damn peaceful in meditation! So you imagine you are far away from its environs. But as you gradually, or sometimes there are moments that feel like a sudden shift in your feeling and understanding like he implies here saying "at the moment dharma is transmitted" - you come to understand it's really just about being yourself - fully and openly and humbly and courageously and with a good sense of humor hopefully too - damn I'm just me! But that settling into just me is a whole different thing from where you started somehow. It is the old you but it also isn't.
Suzuki Roshi - you know the author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind the Japanese founder of San Francisco Zen Center - had a saying like "When you are you, Zen is Zen" which I wonder is directly from these lines of Dōgen's in Genjo Koan.
So that's our deep purpose doing all this mysterious stuff: to remember who we are! Who we are in the big mind kind of way, not just all of those old stories of what happened to us and what kind of person we are and so on. Not that unpacking our psychology and healing from our trauma isn't critical - it is - but that if we only did that we'd be only the realm of the broken person and there's a danger we don't merge with the realm of Buddhas - there's always more personality stuff and history and traumatic stuff to unpack. It's endless right. There's also a value is setting it all done. That the side of our journey of healing and transformation that Zen is, I think, so very very very well suited to which it's working well for us. That we both learn how to solve our problems and how to forget our problems, or to be more clear: how to release from the idea of "me" with all my "problems" - those powerful ideas are useful tools but when we identify with them we will only suffer.
And text goes on with one teaching after the next. It's not so much an essay like we'd think of with an introduction, supporting arguments and a conclusion. Or maybe every paragraph is it's own complete little essay with all of those elements and you can see the whole piece as a kind of string of pearls. A few more of my favorites and I hope you'll explore this wonderful text more on your own - there are quite a few very good commentaries.
There are teachings on the nature of time, on perspective, on the undivided nature of our true lives; there are teachings around how finding your place where you are, truly feeling that to the depth of your being, is Genjo Koan itself - is completely solving the koan of everyday life.
And it ends with a wonderful koan story which I think we have to enjoy together. Go to page 28.
Mayu, Zen Master Baoche, was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, “Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?”
“Although you understand that the nature of wind is permanent,” Mayu replied, “you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere.”
“What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?” asked the monk. Mayu just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.
The actualization of the buddha dharma, the vital path of its authentic transmission, is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind.
The nature of wind is permanent; because of that, the wind of the buddha house brings forth the gold of the earth and ripens the cream of the long river.
A fun story. This is not about wind and fanning of course. It's about our true nature and the nature of practice. Fanning yourself is doing the practice and the great master demonstrates that he too has to keep practicing. Buddha kept sitting every day for hours with his students for the rest of his life. And the wind is awakening. If we switch the words around a little we have:
The actualization of the buddha dharma, the vital path of its authentic transmission, is like this. If you say that you do not need to practice because the nature of being is Buddha and you can have Buddha without practice, you understand neither Buddha nor the nature of practice.
Wonderful teachings and images this inspire us and we enjoy them I think!
And yes inspiration and the joy of the dharma may fade quickly 5 minutes into the next zazen period as you start rehearsing how your going to respond to an email your annoyed by, or just the various vague self-focussed anxious thoughts and images that flit through your mind. Dōgen doesn't really offer us anything to hold onto or direct us around how to realize all of this.
He doesn't say it in his one but in most of his essays he says something like, "You should realize this deeply" - sometimes multiple times in the same essay. But how, Dōgen? How?
So let's again receive instruction from another ancestor on the how: a little more from the 6th century Chinese Buddhist named Master Zhiyi.
Zhiyi is most famous for his in depth commentaries and practices all about the Lotus Sutra - which if you've never explored you have a treat to look forward to - but he’s also one of the few of our Buddhist ancestors who wrote a meditation manual that actually spells out how to do it. There are two connected books actually Six Dharma Gates to the Sublime and Essentials of Buddhist Meditation. 6th century! Just about 2,000 years old with practical advice for us today in sesshin.
By the way, while Dōgen doesn’t mention Zhiyi's meditation instructions specifically he does call out Zhiyi as one of the ancestors on his good list: An Ancient Buddha as opposed to a Bald Headed Rascal as he sometimes called the teachers he didn’t approve of.
Zhiyi suggests 6 major practices. The first 3 are quite straightforward and practical and the second 3 are more subtle and into the mystery. But since we get nothing but mystery from our guy Dōgen, Zhiyi is a great help.
The first practice of breath counting I brought up yesterday, but let's spend a little more time with it this morning as I think it's really worthwhile whether you've never really done it or you used to and it feels like old hat. Or maybe you've been working with it so let's learn more about it and go more deeply into breath counting.
This wonderful practice - so tangible - of lightly marking each exhalation with a number. One....two.....three..... and maybe once in a while making it to ten and going back to one. But much more often probably getting lost somewhere in between three and five and having to go back to one. When I teach it I usually say the best title of counting practice is "returning to one" not "counting to ten."
Isn't it cool learning that people have been doing breath counting for over 1,500 years. It's not some practice an American Zen teacher invented in 1975 when she realized her students minds were wandering. It's ancient and core. And it's not a sign of disappointment in your meditation prowess that you "have to" do breath counting.
Do breath counting. Feel it's depth and subtlety. Stay with it for a while. Maybe a long while. The first decade of my practice that's all I did. I didn't really know there were other options and I'm kind of grateful for that in the end.
But it's not a kind of mechanical thing or a contest with yourself to see if you can get to 10. See if you can invite a broad spacious awareness of the breathing living body with the numbers just the lightest of touch stones, for some reason I was thinking about one of the earliest video games right after pong came out: night driver. The big consoles you'd put quarter in at the pizza place. The only graphics were dotted lines on both sides of an implied road and you had a steering wheel and I think an accelerator and a brake pedal. That was it, otherwise just a dark screen. The road would turn left and right and you had to keep your car between the dotted lines - that was it. So feel into the counting as kind of like those dotted lines helping to hold you on track.
And losing track of the numbers as a wonderfully honest guide back to awareness - and a great humility practice too - no need to have the inner BONK of the video game and use up your quarter with our practice. You just keep going, endlessly.
A favorite Suzuki Roshi quote comes to mind about how we practice endlessly forever with no gaining idea, and when I looked it up I found the original transcript of what he said:
I don’t feel to speak after zazen. I feel the practice of zazen is enough but if I should say something. I think what I shall talk will be how wonderful it is to practice zazen in this way. Our purpose is just to keep this practice forever. This practice is started from beginningless time and it will continue for endless future. Strictly speaking, for human being there is no other practice than this practice. There is no other way of life than this way of life, because Zen practice is direct expression of our true nature....The most important thing is when you practice zazen it is necessary to forget all gaining idea, all dualistic idea. In other words just practice zazen in certain posture.
Suzuki Roshi, like Dōgen, is so wonderful on the spirit of our practice. Once in a while he'd say something tangible and directive but not as much as one might expect trying to introduce a whole new practice to a new land. He talked more about the spirit and understanding and let his own modeling be most of the instruction.
Zhiyi also has some very detailed suggestions for how to breathe. When we first sit down he suggests giving the breathing a kind of deep reset:
Zhiyi - Essentials of Buddhist Meditation, p.85
Next, one should expel the turbid breath. The method for expelling the breath requires that one open the mouth and release the breath while not allowing this process to be either coarse or urgent. One should make it soft and smooth as one releases the breath and sends it forth. One should imagine that, throughout the body, any blockages within the numerous energetic pathways are moved on out as one exhales.
Zhiyi - Essentials of Buddhist Meditation, p.85
Then, one closes the mouth and inhales pure breath through the nose. One should do this up to three times. If the physical respiration is already correctly adjusted, then only once is adequate
Let’s try this breath reset. I’ve also heard it called a cleansing breath.
And then we’re ready - 1, 2, 3 …..
And as we go on we gently monitor the quality of the breathing. It’s not about the counting - the counting is a support for presence and steady and perceptive breath awareness.
He says there are 4 ways of breathing and we gradually refine them as we go.
Zhiyi - Essentials of Buddhist Meditation, p.85
The breath may possess any of characteristics: first, windy breathing; second, uneven breathing; third, normal breathing; and fourth, subtle respiration. The first three are indications of inadequate adjustment whereas the last one is characteristic of correct adjustment.
If you notice the breath is loud and windy - really you shouldn’t be able to hear your breathing with your ears nor should the rest of the zendo hear you breathing. Don’t get uptight and worried about this, just notice - ah the breath is a bit windy. The problem isn’t the windiness, it’s that:
Zhiyi - Essentials of Buddhist Meditation, p.87
If one maintains windy breathing, then one becomes scattered
As with all teachings we should see for ourselves. Is that true if you notice loud breathing is happening, is your mind scattered?
Here’s what to do about your windy breathing says Zhiyi:
Zhiyi - Essentials of Buddhist Meditation, p.87
One should rely on three techniques: First, stabilize the mind by anchoring it below; second, relax and release the body; and third, visualize the breath penetrating through to all of the pores, going forth and coming in without any obstructions whatsoever. If one makes one’s mind subtle, one causes the breath to become very fine. If the breath becomes regulated, then the manifold disorders do not arise. One’s mind easily enters meditative absorption.
The next levels of breathing down from windy he calls uneven breathing. I notice this comes up for me regularly:
Zhiyi - Essentials of Buddhist Meditation, p.87
When one is sitting and, even though the breath makes no sound, there is still a catching and halting such that it does not move on through, this is “uneven” breathing.
And the approach when you notice this happening is the same. Drop the mind down. Relax and release the body and visualize the breath penetrating and flowing so smoothly throughout the whole body. Let is flow, let it flow, let it flow.
And to keep yourself on track: counting is a really great practice.
Suzuki Roshi had a scary experience that inspired him to return to counting practice - here’s the story. [Crooked Cucumber p. 335]
But counting can get stale. Zhiyi says that after you find counting really smooth and subtle you might take up the next practice:
Zhiyi - Six Gates to the Sublime (Dharmamitra), p.29
After a time the mind, imbued with awareness, exercises control from one on up to ten. Without having to put forth any particular effort, the mind abides in the objective conditions associated with the breath. When one becomes aware that the breath has become insubstantial and slight, the mind becomes gradually more subtle along with it. One subsequently becomes concerned that counting has become a coarse activity. One’s state of mind is such that one does not wish to engage in counting. At just such time, the practitioner should let loose of the counting and then proceed to cultivate “following.”
Master Zhiyi's second Dharma Gate is following. Letting the numbers fall away completely. It's actually kind of great to do the first two together. Start with breath counting and let those soft gentle numbers just sort of disappear into the mist. Not a kind of "I will now follow my breath. I do not need the counting now." rejection of the first gate but allowing the first to flow organically into the second.
And then with following we also tune into the quality of the breathing: it is windy or uneven? If so can we drop down, relax and allow the breath to smooth and settle?
And can we take all of this off the cushion? You’re always breathing. Some activities don’t work with counting but plenty do and almost all activities work with following. And can we invite a smooth and even quality of breath throughout the day. There is tons of research on how healthy it is for us to breathe better. And bizarrely when you go to the doctor they don’t ask about the quality of your breathing and suggest these practices.
