Dont be a jerk, p.26
Don't Be a Jerk, page 26
The deluded mind is just the Flower of Dharma twirling. So when we’re in delusion, we’re being twirled by the Flower of Dharma. Don’t get excited about this fact of being twirled, and don’t look forward to it. It isn’t something that just happens and it isn’t something you deliberately do. The twirling of the Flower of Dharma is the one vehicle. It doesn’t matter if it’s the twirler or the one being twirled.
We rely only on the sincere mind that manifests moment by moment. Don’t worry about delusions. Your actions are the bodhisattva way of compassion. What you do at each moment is the Flower of Dharma twirling.
Getting back to the parable from the Lotus Sutra about the burning house, there is delusion inside the burning house, there is delusion at the gateway leading out of the house, and there is also delusion outside the gate. It is delusion that has created the gate and the burning house. Maybe the whole escape takes place on the white ox cart (of Buddhist practice).
Should we think of the open ground (of enlightenment) as the place to enter or the burning house (of delusion) as the place to leave? Is the gate between them just a place we pass through for a moment? Remember that in the white ox cart there is the twirling of the Flower of Dharma that makes us realize and enter the burning house, and on the open ground there is also the twirling of the Flower of Dharma that makes us enter the burning house. There are many, many ways in which the twirling of the Flower of Dharma unfolds the teaching inside the house, at the gate, and on open ground.
So the burning house is beyond understanding. The open ground is beyond understanding. Who is gonna make real circumstances into a vehicle for realization? When we seek to get to the white ox cart from the burning house it looks really far away! Should we come to the conclusion that Buddha’s favorite hang-out spot exists in the peace and tranquility of the open ground? Or should we consider that the open ground is peace and tranquility in Buddha’s favorite hang-out spot?
The Lotus Sutra talks about “wholeheartedly wanting to meet Buddha.” Is this about you or about someone else? Pay close attention. There are times when realization occurs within the individual, and there are times when realization occurs throughout the entire universe.
Buddha was able to appear on Vulture Peak and preach the Lotus Sutra because of his past actions of never begrudging his body or even his life. He teaches by always abiding in the dharma and by using expedient means. Even when you’re so close you can’t see, how can you fail to wholeheartedly understand nonunderstanding?
When we look at the material world it doesn’t mean we can’t see the world of the dharma. When we experience the world of the dharma it doesn’t mean we fail to experience the material world. When Buddhas experience the world of dharma, they don’t exclude us from the experience. It’s all good!
Because this is so, your present form as you are is the real state of experience. Alarm, doubt, and even fear are nothing but reality as it is. Within Buddha’s wisdom, fear is only the difference between looking at stuff as if you’re apart from it and really being right there with it. When we truly sit with what’s real, it doesn’t matter if it feels confining. You’re thoroughly experiencing the blossoming of the Flower of Dharma.
Our profound, eternal state is the twirling of the Flower of Dharma. It’s beyond alarm, doubt, and fear. When the Flower of Dharma twirls, we understand it as Buddha’s wisdom on display. Know that in the state of delusion, the Flower of Dharma is still twirling away!
“The enlightened mind twirls the Flower of Dharma” describes the twirling of the Flower of Dharma. Which is to say, when you are fully twirled by the Flower of Dharma, you have the power to twirl the Flower of Dharma. Even though the twirling never ceases we naturally twirl it ourselves. It’s just “this and that being done, now you gotta do the other thing.” It is realized at every moment on Earth and throughout the universe.
Don’t fall for the way the world disbelieves this stuff and then be surprised. Even their disbelief is the twirling of the Flower of Dharma. At the time of the twirling of the Flower of Dharma, realization exists as the twirling of the Flower of Dharma, and the twirling of the Flower of Dharma exists as realization. This is the eternal life of the Buddha.
We shouldn’t await some state of awareness. And we shouldn’t assume our current state is without awareness. Every possible state is awareness. There’s not even a gap big enough for a speck of dust.
The twirling of the Flower of Dharma is “form is emptiness.” It “neither appears nor disappears.” The twirling of the Flower of Dharma is “emptiness is form.” It is “no birth, no death.”*
In the Lotus Sutra there’s a story about how a guy gets totally wasted and passes out. His friend, who is going away for a long time, sews a priceless jewel into the guy’s clothes so that he’ll have something to bargain with in case he gets in trouble later. A long time passes, and they run into each other again. The guy who’d gotten wasted is a mess. He’s got nothing to his name except the clothes he had when they last met. His friend is like, “What are you, completely stupid? I gave you a priceless jewel! You could’ve lived comfortably for a long time with that!” The Sutra says that’s how we are. We were given priceless wisdom, yet we wander around as if we know nothing at all.
Remember that when someone is a close friend to us, we’re a close friend to that person too. We have to carefully examine moments of having been given a priceless jewel sewn into our clothes. These stories are metaphors for real life.
Don’t just see this twirling of the Flower of Dharma as something the great saints did a real long time ago. The Buddha preaches the great vehicle today! When the Flower of Dharma is the Flower of Dharma, we don’t sense it and we don’t realize it. It’s beyond knowing and understanding. A million, bazillion, quintillion years are just an instant of the Flower of Dharma twirling.
It’s been hundreds of years since the Lotus Sutra was introduced to China and twirled like a Flower of Dharma. Lots of people both in Japan and China have written commentaries and interpretations. Some have even become enlightened by reading the sutra. But nobody ever really got it the way Daikan Eno did!
Now that we’ve been able to hear what he said about it, it’s as if this very place is the eternal Land of the Buddhas. How cool is that?
Reality as it is is a treasure and an eternal seat of the truth, profound, great, and everlasting. Mind in delusion or mind in realization, the Flower of Dharma twirls the Flower of Dharma.
The Dharma Flower twirls while we’re in delusion
We twirl the Dharma Flower when we’re free of this confusion
When you perfectly realize this you can’t be dour
’Cuz it’s just Dharma Flower twirling Dharma Flower
— Written on a day during the summer retreat of 1241 and presented to Etatsu on the occasion of his becoming a monk. Good luck in your life as a monk, and never forget the Lotus Sutra
This was a bear of a chapter to summarize. I feel like I didn’t really do it justice, but I hope I’ve given you just enough to get a taste of what’s in the actual chapter. As I keep saying, there are plenty of standard translations, several of which you can access free of charge online. Check ’em out.
There are a couple of things you should know about the Lotus Sutra in general. The first is that it was the first sutra to introduce the idea of the Eternal Buddha. This doesn’t mean that it was about how the Buddha lived forever and ever. Well, not exactly, anyway.
The idea is that Shakyamuni Buddha was the physical manifestation of something living and eternal that still remains with us today. In some sense it’s like the Christian notion of the Holy Spirit. It’s not necessarily that the Buddha is eternal in the temporal sense, although that’s included too. It’s more that the Buddha is a living and eternal principle.
Often Buddhist teachers and writers play fast and loose with the word Buddha. Sometimes it means the historical figure from India, and sometimes it means this eternal principle. Many Christian mystics used the word Christ in much the same way. Dōgen does this throughout this chapter.
Then there’s the idea of upaya, or “expedient means,” which also first appears in the Lotus Sutra. The story of the kids in the burning house is the classic example. In the story the father lies to his children about there being goodies outside in order to save them from dying in the house. The idea is that the children are too dumb to know what’s actually going on, so their dad uses his wits to come up with the best idea he can for getting them to leave the house.
All the Buddhist teachings, then, are kinds of expedient means. We shouldn’t take them too literally, or we miss the point. This also has some parallels in Christianity. If we take Jesus’s parables or some of the Christian imagery and mythology too literally, we end up missing the point there too.
Let’s look at the last four lines of Daikan Eno’s poem:
Thought beyond thought is thought that is right
Thought within thought is thought that’s just trite
When we transcend with and without
We ride the white ox cart everywhere all about
In the original Chinese this is (Munen nen soku jo, Unen nen sei jaku, U mu ku fukei, Chogo haku-gyusha). Nishijima/Cross has, “Without intention the mind is right / With intention the mind becomes wrong / When we transcend both with and without / We ride eternally on the white ox cart.” Tanahashi has, “Thinking beyond thinking is right / Thinking about thinking is wrong / If thinking and beyond thinking do not divide the mind / You can steer the white ox cart endlessly.” The Shasta Abbey translation says, “To read It without opinion’s bonds is the proper way / But read It bound to fixed ideas, and It becomes error’s way / When you cease to judge whether you are bound or not / You ride forever long within the cart by the White Ox drawn.”
As you can see, this is a hard poem to translate! The character (nen) is usually translated as “thought,” which is why Tanahashi translates it as “thinking.” But this character has more a sense of deliberate thought or consideration than of the more passive kind of images and words that run through your mind seemingly at random. This is why Nishijima/Cross say “intention” and Shasta Abbey’s translation has “opinion.”
So what in holy heck is “thinking beyond thinking?” A lot of people, both here and in Asia, imagine that meditation means making your mind a complete blank. The great twentieth-century Zen teacher Kodo Sawaki used to say, “The only time your mind is a complete blank is when you’re dead!”
When you do zazen, you’re not trying to achieve a totally empty mind. That would be impossible. But you are trying to avoid the deliberate habitual manipulation of thoughts and images we usually engage in. To me, that’s all this whole “thinking beyond thinking” stuff actually means. You point your brain toward something beyond thought, and hope for the best.
Later on we get a lot of stuff about the burning house, the gate, and the open ground. This business goes on for a whole lot longer in the original than what I used in this book. It consists mainly of a very complex set of rearrangements of strings of Chinese characters from the Lotus Sutra. I went over a few different translations as well as the original for quite a while trying to come up with an adequate way of summarizing it.
Basically, the point is that the burning house represents delusion, the gate represents the moment of transcending delusion — an “enlightenment experience” — and the open ground represents enlightenment. But Dōgen never explains Buddhist practice as a nice linear movement from delusion through an experience of realization and ending with a permanent state of enlightenment. Lots of people imagine Buddhist practice to be like that. I know I certainly did. But it’s not that way at all.
The Nishijima/Cross translation offers a few explanations in the footnotes. He says that Dōgen here denies “the idealistic idea that delusion only exists in the burning house.” So delusion can exist even in a supposedly “enlightened person.” There is no permanent state of enlightenment, and there are no forever-enlightened beings. This is a really important point.
Lots of people claim to be enlightened beings, and some of them probably even believe they are. But to imagine yourself as fully awakened and as forever incapable of being deluded is the worst kind of delusion. Dōgen emphasizes this over and over in this chapter, and elsewhere. His language is highly metaphorical and depends on his audience knowing the Lotus Sutra thoroughly. As we have seen, this chapter of Shōbōgenzō was specifically written for a person who had studied the Lotus Sutra extensively. For those of us who don’t know the Lotus Sutra well, or at all, it takes a bit of digging to get to the meaning.
In another footnote to this chapter Nishijima says, “Even people who are in the state of Buddhist wisdom can experience realization by recognizing their thoughts as thoughts.” I feel like the single most important thing I ever learned from Buddhist practice is that my thoughts are just thoughts. That doesn’t sound like much. Most of us believe we already understand this. I know I did.
But after many years of practice I became aware for the first time that my thoughts were far more dominant in my life than I’d ever imagined. My entire reality could be shifted by a change in thinking. It was scary to see. I’m talking here about massive shifts in perception, not just a matter of changing my mind about some idea. It was incredible how deep into my system certain thoughts had gone.
After working with this for a couple of years it started dawning on me that, as powerful as these deeply entrenched thoughts were, even those deeply entrenched thoughts were still only thoughts. Even the really, really important and vital-seeming ones were made of the same stuff as, say, a passing thought about a plate of shrimp or whatever. None of them mattered nearly as much as they seemed to. Most of them didn’t matter at all.
The first moment of understanding that clearly was shocking. Although it had been building for years, it seemed to happen all at once. It felt like a huge shift in absolutely everything. Even the outside world seemed to change completely. I’ve lived with this state for a number of years now, so it’s become my “new normal.” It’s much better than the previous state. But, as Dōgen keeps pointing out, it’s not a permanently fixed condition. It’s still quite possible to fall right back into the old patterns even while knowing full well that it’s a mistake to do so.
Another of Nishijima’s footnotes to the burning house story says that Dōgen denies the “idealistic interpretations of entering and leaving — reality is where we are already, and so there is no area to be entered and no area to be left.” This is another crucial part of Dōgen’s philosophy. Things can change, we can come to see reality more clearly, but we don’t go anywhere. What we experience at every moment is beyond being categorized as delusion or enlightenment. Even our delusion takes place within, and is part of, enlightenment. That’s why we don’t direct our efforts at attaining enlightenment as a goal. Rather, we try to sit quietly within our delusion until we can see it clearly for what it is.
Another Nishijima footnote says, “Buddhist teaching always affirms the reality of the not-ideal situation, even for those who have real wisdom and are living in the peaceful state.” So we enter the burning house even while remaining on the open ground. It’s not an either-or situation. Our lives continue, even when the balanced state is established.
Nishijima also notes, “Buddhist wisdom can still be realized even after the process is complete.” It’s not that enlightenment is a finishing line, after which we’re all done. Our training continues forever.
Nishijima says in yet another footnote, “We can sometimes realize the state in painful or emotional experiences.” So, again, we’re not aiming at an idealized state of pure, blank tranquility. Even in our pain, there is enlightenment.
The sentence I’ve summarized as, “Even when you’re so close you can’t see, how can you fail to wholeheartedly understand nonunderstanding?” in the original Japanese this is (shi fuken no suigon naru, tare ka isshin no kai fukai wo shinzaran). Tanahashi translates this as, “Who has trust in understanding and trust in beyond understanding when Buddha says, ‘They do not see me, although I am close to them’ ”? Nishijima has, “In the state of being so close yet failing to see, who could not believe in understanding of non-understanding by wholeheartedness?” Shasta Abbey’s translation says, “It is our not seeing Buddha, though Such is near; so who, pray, lacks the faith to wholeheartedly grasp That Which Is Beyond Our Grasp?”
The key part for me is (kai fukai), which is “understanding nonunderstanding” or “understanding beyond understanding” or “grasp(ing) That Which Is Beyond Our Grasp” (the odd capitalization is in Shasta Abbey’s original). Dōgen asks us to wholeheartedly trust this understanding of nonunderstanding.
This is what the Korean Zen teacher Seung Sahn calls “don’t know mind.” It’s difficult to fully trust in our nonknowing. To do so is to act from intuition rather than concrete understanding. We’re trained not to do that. But Buddhist practice emphasizes this kind of nonunderstanding. Our knowledge is always incomplete, and our brains always misinterpret so much, that the only thing we can truly trust is intuition.
The next chapter gets into this concept even more deeply. Let’s take a look!
*Like many lines in this piece, this opening phrase is strung together from phrases found in the Lotus Sutra. I’m not going to note every place he does this. But I encourage you to seek out the Nishijima/Cross translation of Shōbōgenzō if you’d like to find them all.
** (yui-butsu yō-butsu nani gujin shohō jisso). This is a quotation from the Lotus Sutra.
†I’ve cut a massive section out of here in which Dōgen references a number of stories from the Lotus Sutra.
*The phrases in quotation marks are from the Heart Sutra.
23. STOP TRYING TO GRAB MY MIND!
Shin Fukatoku
The Mind Cannot Be Grasped
