Dont be a jerk, p.11
Don't Be a Jerk, page 11
Now let’s get back to looking at the fossils Dōgen left behind.
9. A LIST OF RULES
Ju-undo Shiki
Rules for the Hall of the Accumulated Cloud
THE SATURDAY-AFTERNOON LECTURES by Nishijima Roshi that I attended for more than ten years always followed the same format. First we’d do thirty minutes of zazen. Then we’d move to another room, and Nishijima would start reading a chapter of Shōbōgenzō. Sometimes he’d stop and comment on something. But mostly he just read the English translation he was working on with Mike Cross straight through. After about thirty minutes of this he’d ask if anyone had questions, and a discussion would follow. After about thirty more minutes of talking we’d adjourn. He started at the beginning of Shōbōgenzō and went through every chapter week by week till the final one. Then the following week he started over again.
For most of the time I went to these lectures he was actively working on his English translation. So we were listening to a work in progress, although by the time I joined the group most of the major work was done.
Most of the chapters in Shōbōgenzō are deeply philosophical. But a few are very dry, technical pieces about proper etiquette in a Zen monastery. Whenever Nishijima got to one of Dōgen’s nuts-and-bolts pieces like the one we’re about to look at or the one a few chapters later about washing, I always hoped he would just skip it. He never did. He always said that Dōgen’s was a “philosophy of action.” It wasn’t just a philosophy of thoughts and concepts; it was a philosophy you actually did. Chapters like this one, he said, give us a glimpse into how Dōgen carried out his philosophy on a day-to-day basis.
This chapter is basically a list of rules for how monks ought to behave in the meditation hall. The specifics of the rules don’t really matter that much for anyone who doesn’t plan on opening their own Japanese-style meditation center. In fact, most contemporary meditation centers, even in Dōgen’s tradition, don’t really follow all these rules to the letter anymore.
It’s the attitude that these rules express that’s important. If you can find the attitude that lies behind them, you can come up with your own completely valid tradition for whatever you do in life. It can inform how you treat your desk and your cubicle, or the room with your guitars and amplifiers, or the studio where you keep your paints and brushes, or whatever you spend your day doing.
People who have a will to the truth and who throw away fame and profit may enter the zazen hall. Don’t let insincere people in. If you let somebody in by mistake then, after consideration, kick them out. Nicely.
Remember that not too many people have the will to the truth or the guts to throw away fame and gain. The efforts we make right here and now will become the source of Buddha’s way for future generations. Feeling compassion for the future, we need to value the present.
Everyone in the hall should harmonize like milk and water. We should all promote each other’s moral behavior. For now we are students and teachers, but in the future we will be Buddhist patriarchs.
Our practice is tough, so don’t forget your honest intention. We’ve all left our homes and families. Now we rely on clouds and rivers, on nature itself. Taking care of each other’s health and promoting each other’s practice is worth even more than anything our parents did for us. Our parents are only parents between birth and death, but the members of this hall are friends forever.
We shouldn’t go out a lot. If necessary you can go out once a month. Our predecessors lived way up in the mountains and never saw anybody else. We should remember how they shut themselves away from the world and covered their tracks.
Now is the time to act, just as if your head was on fire. How could we not regret wasting this time on secular pursuits? Our life is like a dewdrop on a blade of grass. We don’t know when we’ll lose it. To waste it would be pitiful.
Even though there are books about Zen, don’t read them in the meditation hall. Go somewhere else if you want to read. Don’t waste any time.
Let the leader of the hall know where you’re going, no matter what time it is. Don’t wander around willy-nilly. That messes up stuff for everybody. You don’t know when you’re gonna die, so don’t risk dying while you’re just out farting around.
Don’t smack people for making mistakes. Don’t hate other people’s mistakes. An old master said that if you don’t pay attention to other people’s errors or to your own correctness, everyone will respect you. But don’t learn other people’s bad habits, either. Practice your own virtue. Buddha stopped people from doing wrong, but he never hated them.
Whenever you want to do something, whether it’s a big deal or a small one, let the leader of the hall know. People who do stuff without letting the leader know should be expelled. If formalities between students and leaders are disrupted it gets hard to tell right from wrong.
Don’t gossip in or around the hall.
Don’t practice ceremonial walking in the hall.
Don’t bring counting beads into the hall, and don’t walk around with your hands hanging down.
Don’t recite sutras in the hall unless a donor requests it and everybody recites together.
Don’t blow your nose loudly in the hall, and don’t hack or spit. That’s gross. Work on your behavior as if you were a fish in a stream that was drying out.
Don’t wear clothes made of brocade in the hall. Wear clothes made out of paper and cotton and the like. Since ancient times people who clarified the truth did it that way.
Don’t come in the hall drunk or high. If you do so by accident, then prostrate yourself and apologize. Don’t come in smelling of leeks and onions.*
If people argue they should be sent back to their rooms. People arguing messes things up for everybody. People who see an argument coming but don’t do anything about it are equally at fault.
Anyone who ignores the rules of the hall should be expelled. Anyone who is in cahoots with such a person is also at fault.
Don’t annoy everybody by bringing visitors into the hall. If you have to talk to visitors near the hall, be quiet about it. Don’t brag to visitors about your training, hoping they’ll give you a present. If a visitor really wants to come in and walk around the hall, you can bring them in. But tell the hall leader about it first.
Remember, we monks live in this hall, we eat and sleep here as well as meditate. So don’t be lazy about the rest of your duties, like going to lectures and stuff.
If someone drops their silverware or chopsticks while eating they have to pay a penalty from their oil ration. So be careful with that stuff.
Follow the Buddhist precepts. Those precepts should be engraved on your bones and etched into your brain.**
We should pray that our whole life will be peaceful and undisturbed so that we can pursue the truth naturally.
These few rules are the body and mind of the eternal Buddha. We should revere and follow them.
— Written by Dōgen, the founder of Kannon-dori-kosho-horin-ji Temple, on April 25, 1238
Those rules are pretty straightforward. Buddhist temples both now and in the past tend to have big, long lists of very specific rules. But Dōgen’s rules are all pretty basic and general. Later in life he did produce longer lists of rules, but they all derived from this simple set.
When you get right down to it, all these rules can pretty much be summed up as, “Don’t be a jerk in the meditation hall.” It’s all about respecting others and letting them get on with what they came into the hall for in the first place: to be monks and meditate together. If you can just do that consistently, you really don’t need any other rules.
All the Zen places I’ve visited in my travels as a teacher and writer have had some version of these rules. When you go to Tassajara during the summer as a student, they make you sign a piece of paper saying you understand and intend to abide by their rules, which are just a variation of these.
You no longer have to pay a penalty in oil for dropping your chopsticks at most Zen temples. The folks at Tassajara are actually pretty tolerant about that kind of thing since they get so many newcomers. But you’re still not allowed to come in drunk. Nose blowing, while grudgingly allowed in most Zen places I’ve been to, tends to be discouraged. If you blow your nose once in most contemporary Zen places, nobody will say anything, but if you do it several times they might ask you to step outside.
In the old days, monks ate and slept in the meditation hall. These days there are still temples that hold formal meals in the meditation hall. The monks eat in a style called oryoki, which is intended to allow you to kinda sorta keep meditating even while you eat. In an oryoki meal service, you stay at your cushion and someone brings your food to you in a very ritualized way. Serving is usually done on a kind of rotation so that everyone gets an opportunity to be a server.
After the food is served you chant several verses of thanks to those who made the food and to the food itself. After all, even if you’re the strictest vegan in the world, something died so that you could live, even if it’s just a carrot or a mouse that got in the way of the harvester. You also chant a vow to use the energy you derive from your food to continue your practice. Only then are you allowed to eat, and the eating itself is done in a highly controlled manner. It’s a beautiful practice and it’s also super-annoying — often in equal measures.
You don’t find too many places where they still sleep in the meditation hall except in the really austere temples in Japan. In those temples you can’t bring any more stuff with you than can fit in a little box by your meditation cushion. So you have to leave your electric guitar and your PlayStation2 at home.
Whenever I come to that line about hacking and spitting it reminds me that the temple these rules were written for was mostly filled with young dudes. In those days male and female training centers were separate. For the most part they still are in Asia. These guys were often in their early teens when they joined. Dōgen, for example, was twelve when he became a monk, and that was not unprecedented. Instead of envisioning ancient temples filled with stereotypical serene monks straight out of Central Casting, it may be more useful to envision them full of hormonally charged teenagers with little formal education and lots of issues such as depression, social anxiety, problems with their parents, maybe a little post-traumatic stress, and plenty of other baggage.
You get a different kind of clientele at most Zen centers in the West these days. People at Zen centers are generally pretty well educated and tend to be older. The Zen temples I go to in the States generally seem to be full of graying middle-agers. In Dōgen’s day most of the monks were farmhands, country boys. So probably a lot of them didn’t have very good manners to begin with, just in general. It must have been a steep learning curve for some of them to enter a temple, and I’m sure a lot of them were sent home because they just couldn’t hack it. (I mean, with all their hacking and such.)
Which is not to say that Zen temples these days aren’t still full of people with issues. You don’t generally take such a drastic step as moving into a meditation center unless you are aware that something is very wrong in your life and that you need help. In some ways contemporary Zen centers resemble halfway houses for people who are seeking ways to get by in the world without falling to pieces.
Of course not everybody is an emotional mess. And since the practice really does help with these issues, you’ll find lots of people who are handling things very well in spite of whatever issues they were battling when they first arrived. Also, there tends to be a strong sense of comradery among those who know how hard life was before they entered monastic life and how hard monastic life can be, as well as why monastic living helps.
Among the specific rules Dōgen cites here, the thing about walking around with your arms hanging down is an especially irksome point for me. When you’re inside a Zen meditation hall you’re supposed to walk around with your hands held in front of your chest in a gesture called shashu. That’s a way of showing respect to the space itself and to the people in it. Whenever I go to Zen places in America and Europe there are always a few people who either didn’t get the instruction about that or who figure it doesn’t apply to them. They look like a bunch of low-class gorillas to me when they walk around with their arms hanging down and swinging around.
Anyway, as I said at the beginning, to me this chapter is all about attitude. It’s about being respectful and the importance of disciplined practice. But don’t fret too much. If you find yourself in a Zen place somewhere and you’ve forgotten the rules, just look around and see what everyone else is doing. It’s not all that choreographed. You’ll be fine!
*There are two ways of interpreting what Dōgen wrote here. It could also mean, “Don’t come in all red-faced and drunk.” The “leeks and onions” version is the more common interpretation in Japan, but the one about being drunk makes more sense in context. Still, the “leeks and onions” version is something you’ll probably hear if you hang out with Zen people.
**The precepts are: observe the rules of society and the rules of the universe; work for the salvation of all; don’t kill; don’t steal; don’t desire too much; don’t lie; don’t live by selling intoxicants; don’t criticize monks or laypeople; don’t berate others; don’t be stingy; don’t get angry; and don’t abuse the three treasures, Buddha, dharma, and sangha. We’ll take these up later.
10. YOU’RE ALREADY ENLIGHTENED, EXCEPT YOU’RE NOT
Soku Shin Ze Butsu
Mind Here and Now Is Buddha
ONE OF THE great joys of doing this project is that I’m starting to understand and see things about Shōbōgenzō that I managed to miss over the past twenty-odd years of studying it.
The first time I read it I did so because I’d been listening to Nishijima Roshi’s lectures for a year or more, and he always talked about Shōbōgenzō. I knew he was pouring all his energy into translating the complete text into English. He was not the first person to do this. But his version was only the second complete translation into English ever done. At the time it was published, the previous complete edition was out of print, so his was really the only English version you could get with every chapter included.
The first complete version by Kōsen Nishiyama and John Stevens was, even in those days, nearly impossible to find and has become even harder to get in recent years. When I started this project I did a search on Amazon and someone had volume three of that edition, going for $28,729.14. You also needed to kick in $3.99 because at that price they couldn’t possibly throw in free shipping. A few weeks later I spotted a full set of all four volumes for $100, which I bought right away for my research, since I’d never owned the full set before. That’s about the best price you can expect to find.
Be that as it may, since Nishijima was involved in such a monumental undertaking and since I knew him personally, I figured the least I could do was read the darn thing. So I dug in. I didn’t concern myself with understanding what I was reading. My goal was simply to turn the pages, scan my eyes across the words, and take in whatever I could.
Eventually I read the four volumes all the way through, three times. I also reread the parts I particularly liked God only knows how many more times. Dozens, I’m sure. Since then I’ve lectured on Shōbōgenzō and written books about it. But I’m still finding new things.
For example, while preparing this book I noticed that Dōgen mentions the phrase “mind here and now is Buddha” a number of times in his early pieces and then later on gives us an entire chapter just about that phrase. For the first time I saw how he was engaging in an ongoing dialogue with his audience.
In some ways, Dōgen was sort of like an ancient Buddhist blogger. He wrote these pieces and then delivered most of them as sermons in his temple. Afterward there must have been questions from the monks. I don’t think they did Q&A sessions after Dōgen’s talks, although there’s no way of knowing. But Dōgen and his monks lived together in a tiny temple in the middle of nowhere (or at least on the outskirts of Kyoto, if we’re talking about his first temple). The monks must have taken Dōgen aside from time to time and asked about the things he said. In reading these pieces I’m starting to view them as the fruits of these discussions.
Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that these pieces were the dregs of the discussions, the fossils, the little bits that were left over after the good stuff was gone. Buddhism being an oral tradition, face-to-face conversation always beats anything that can be written down. Remember that.
In his introduction to this piece Nishijima Roshi says, “The principle ‘mind here and now is Buddha’ must be understood not from the standpoint of the intellect, but from the standpoint of practice. In other words, the principle does not mean belief in something spiritual called ‘mind’ but it affirms the time ‘now’ and the place ‘here’ as reality itself.”
We’ll take this up and more after looking at the piece itself. See you there!
Every Buddha and every patriarch maintained the principle that mind here and now is Buddha. However, this phrase was not heard in India. It was first spoken in China.
When dumb people hear “mind here and now is Buddha” they think it means that the intellect and sense perception of people who’ve never established the truth is Buddha. That’s because they don’t have decent teachers.
A guy called Senika was a good example of someone who thought he understood Buddhism and wrote a lot about it but never got it at all. Here’s what he says.
