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The state in which water is sprinkled on the head is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it], following birth in a family, we are at last able to realize anuttara samyaksaṃbodhi. 潅頂地是法明門、從生出家、乃至得成阿耨多羅三藐三菩提故. At last, we reach the final gate of dharma illumination, and this is the end of the story we started with the last couple of gates. The two kanji being translated here as the state in which water is sprinkled on the head are usually read as consecration, but they do literally mean pouring something on the head. You’ll recall at Gate 108 we learned that in Japanese, this ceremonial sprinkling is kanchō or kanjo 灌頂. It’s a term that comes from the Sanskrit abhisheka and it’s older than Buddhism; it’s also part of the Hindu tradition. Abhisheka is a religious ritual in which you pour a liquid offering over an image of a deity while chanting. In the esoteric Buddhist traditions, this ceremonial water sprinking goes with initiations of some kind: conferring precents, dharma transmission, or maybe as a protection from disaster or preparation for the next life. The symbolism is of transferring the Tathagatha’s wisdom to someone, and water is a metaphor for the wisdom of awakening. However, this isn’t the only kind of consecration possible; there’s also: (a) by a buddhaʼs laying his hand on the head of a disciple 摩頂灌頂. (b) buddha’s oral prediction of discipleʼs future enlightenment 授記灌頂. (c) buddhaʼs emission of light for the benefit of the disciple 放光灌頂. All of these use the same kanji for kanjo, even though there’s no actual pouring on the head. We’ve spent enough time on abisheka at Gate 108 that our time is better spent here considering “birth in a family” and “realize anuttara samyaksaṃbodhi.” Again, in Buddhist cosmology, there’s a special realm for bodhisattvas who are at final stage before becoming Buddhas, Tushita Heaven. This is the end of line; you’ve done everything you need to do, and when you karma is finished playing itself out, your next stop is buddhahood. Bodhisattvas like Maitreya, the next buddha, are waiting there, looking for the right opportunity to be reborn in the world. The four-kanji phrase translated here as “birth in a family” has two interesting parts that aren’t obvious from the English, The first two mean to come forth or appear, but the sense is through taking on life or coming to life. The last two are shukke: the same shukke as shukke tokudo, leaving home and becoming a member of the ordained sangha. The sense of this is not just being reborn in a human family and living out life as a farmer or business person or parent. This is someone who takes on human form, who enters into the human realm among the six realms of samsara, and at some appropriate time, ordains as a homeleaver and makes a life committment to the dharma. These are very specific karmic circumstances that are leading to realizing anuttara samyaksaṃbodhi. The bodhisattva has received a prediction of buddhahood from a buddha. He’s at highest stage, having reached Tushita heaven after lifetimes of practice. He knows that after one more life he’ll be a buddha, and he’s poised on that threshhold, waiting for rebirth. He can’t be born just anywhere, in any realm if he’s going to achieve buddhahood; it has to be within the human realm of samsara. If he’s reborn in some other heaven realm, he’ll eventually use up the merit he’s accumulated that got him there and be reborn in some lower realm of samsara. If he’s born in an animal realm or hell realm, there’s no incentive and opportunity to practice. The only way to get to buddhahood is from the human realm, complete with suffering and delusion, but also full of dharma gates. As Dogen says toward end of Fukanzazengi, You have gained the pivotal opportunity of human form. Do not pass your days and nights in vain. Not only does this bodhisattva have to be born as a human, he has to encounter Buddha’s teachings and decide to practice, and he has to be so committed that he leaves his human family and takes lifelong vows and enters the sangha. He takes precepts in a ceremony that points to abhisheka, water being sprinkled on the head, and he leaves behind all the distractions of worldly life and focuses completely on the Buddha way. From here, his karma continues to play out until it’s exhausted, but he’s already attained prajna, or great wisdom. What is “realizing anuttara samyaksaṃbodhi”? It means attaining supreme or perfect enlightenment. When you’ve done this, you’re a buddha. This complete perfect enlightenment is considered the highest of the three forms of enlightenment. The other two are focused on attaining awakening either by or for oneself because the practitioner doesn’t understand emptiness. These are very mature and experienced practitioners; they thoroughly understand the four noble truths and the chain of causality, but they’re practicing for their own liberation, and can’t liberate others so they’re considered to be at lower level than the bodhisattva or buddha. Bodhisattvas understands emptiness through their own practice, personal experience and insight. They see that conditioned things are empty of a permanent self-nature and they’ve been able to resolve ignorance because they can see reality accurately as it is. They’ve eliminated the obstacles and hindrances to wisdom that result in deluded, unskillful action. On that basis, then, bodhisattvas practice not for themselves but in order to help others to practice. They aspire that everyone else should cross over before they do. Out of compassion, they share their wisdom with others in order to lift them up out of samsara and lead them to liberation. That means they’re out there talking about the four noble truths and making people understand suffering, the cause of suffering, how it ceases and how we do that, and that wisdom and understanding comes from their own practice and their own complete perfect enlightenment. They’re not just repeating what Buddha said or what they read. This is exactly what Buddha did in his manifestation as nirmanakaya, the historical Buddha we know as Shakyamuni. He took up the problem of human suffering and tried various kinds of spiritual practice in order to understand it. As a young adult he has a series of insights into the nature of suffering and reality, and those insights came from his own practice. No mysterious beings came to him and gave him magical knowledge. After that, he spent the rest of his life until he was an old man traveling around and teaching the dharma to others, helping them to practice and to work toward their own liberation so they could help others. We can see why the bodhisattva in Tushita heaven needs to be born into the human realm of samsara and encounter the dharma and commit to actually practicing. Next stop Buddhahood, but this is how we get there. When we refer to "The Buddha" we usually mean Shakyamuni, but in the Mahayana tradition there can be many, many buddhas. If you attain complete perfect enlightenment and lead others to the same insight you have, you’re a buddha, an awakened one. In our tradition there are three kinds of three treasures, and that means there are three kinds of Buddha treasure. Dogen describes them in the Kyojukaimon that we read out during ryaku fusatsu. For each of the three treasures, there’s a manifesting version, a maintaining version and an absolute version. The Manifesting Buddha treasure is the historical Buddha or Shakyamuni, the human being who had an awakening experience and taught the dharma to his own sangha. The Maintaining Buddha treasure is in the figures we encounter today, which may be statues, pictures or other representations of Buddha that support our practice and aspiration. The Absolute Buddha treasure is awakening or wisdom itself, not contained within a being that appears and disappears. The Absolute Buddha treasure really includes everything: the absolute dharma as the truth of reality and the absolute sangha as peaceful and harmonious functioning. I think the word “realize” here is important. It's not realize as in understand, but as in make real. We gain the pivotal opportunity of human form and are born in a family, we practice and get in touch with our own awakening, and now that awakening is real -- not our idea, not some potential for another day or somewhere else. We are moving through the concrete world with an actual body and mind, carrying out actions that affect others and our environment as well as ourselves, and that set subsequent causes and conditions in motion to produce results. Suddenly the dharma stops being something we read about and think about and discuss, and practice stops being something we’ll get to at some point when we have more time. We see that our whole lives and all of our activities with this body and mind are practice and are manifestations of awakening. Buddha is no longer the Bodhisattva Protector of Illumination, sitting up in an ephemeral heaven realm somewhere waiting to be born. He’s right here and we’re living his life. He’s arrived (though he never left). Thus the path to realizing Buddhahood is exactly these 108 gates. We’ve covered: - conduct of body, speech and mind - the six kinds of mindfulness - the four brahma viharas - the four dharma seals - the 37 elements of bodhi - the four abodes of mindfulness - the five faculties - the five powers - the eightfold path - the six paramitas - and many other gates that don’t fall into a neat category In other words, practice in the world is how we realize awakening. Bodhisattva Protector of Illumination tells his audience that he’s preaching these 108 gates as his last instructions to them, so they’ll remember him. He creates a setting so unbelievably magnificent that it convinces all the other beings that what he has to say is going to be better than anything they have in the world of desire, or samsara. Dogen includes the list of 108 gates in the 12-fascicle version of his Shobogenzo and at the end, he says that this is what bodhisattvas in Tushita heaven do. They proclaim this teaching and talk about these dharma gates without fail before they appear in the world. However, the students who have known them clearly are few, and those who do not know them are as common as rice, flax, bamboo, and reeds. Even though this teaching is always given and even though these dharma gates are essentials of the practice, somehow we still don’t get it, so, he says, I’m including them here for the benefit of beginners and senior students. Even if we’ve been practicing a long time and have heard this teaching before, that doesn’t mean we completely understand it. Then his last four sentences are: Those who would ascend the lion seat and become the teachers of human beings and gods should painstakingly learn them in practice. Without having lived in this Tuṣita Heaven as [a bodhisattva] bound by one life, we are not buddhas at all. Practitioners, do not be proud of yourselves at random. For a bodhisattva bound by one life, there is no intermediate stage. The lion seat is wherever the Buddha is sitting. It could be an opulent throne or it could be the bare ground. Whenever he sits down and starts teaching, we hear the lion’s roar, so lion’s roar is another name for the dharma in the sense of what Buddha taught. If we want to sit in the place of Buddha and teach the dharma to people and gods, then we should painstakingly learn these gates in practice -- in other words, as our own experience, not just as what someone else says. Without having lived in Tushita heaven as bodhisattvas with only one more life to go before being buddhas, we aren’t buddhas at all. Remember, these bodhisattvas have practiced life after life for many, many lifetimes, and that’s where their insights, wisdom and compassion come from. This is why nonreliance is a key element of our practice at Sanshin. No one can practice for us, and no one can just give us awakening. We have to walk forward on our own legs. Now we’ve been through 108 or 109 dharma gates. What exactly is a dharma gate? Certainly we get an image of passing through an opening from one condition or set of circumstances to another, and indeed, Buddha’s teaching is regarded as the entry to awakening. If we can go through all these gates, we find ourselves in the middle of unsurpassed complete perfect enlightenment. For each instance of human delusion, Buddha was said to provide a method of dealing with it, a teaching or a practice. The usual number is 84-thousand. We’re supposed to have 84-thousand delusions, so there are supposed to be 84-thousand dharma gates, but 84-thousand is another way to say myriad, uncountable, infinite. This list has 108 gates because as we saw back at Gate 36, 108 is an important number in our tradition. However, as we say when we chant the four vows, Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them (homon muryo seigan gaku 法門無量誓願學) What does that mean in our day to day practice? We can consider any challenge that arises in our life as a dharma gate, an opportunity to practice. What do I do in the face of conflict in a relationship, illness or injury, stuff going wrong on a project, losing my keys, spilling my tea? I’m up against some kind of block or limitation. It’s an opportunity for discernment that leads to skillful action that’s in accord with the dharma, or in accord with the true reality of this moment. I use the word discernment on purpose, and I don’t mean just “figuring out what to do.” In a Christian context, discernment might mean hearing what God has to say about the situation. In our case, it might be more like seeing with prajna -- seeing the way Buddha sees -- without the hindrances of self clinging and three poisons. It’s one thing to read a lot of books about Buddhism or even to sit a lot of zazen, and another to take that practice out into the real world as the basis of how you see things and what you actually do with this body and mind. Going through a dharma gate doesn’t mean looking up what to do. It means experiencing the reality of this moment with your whole karmic being from a practice point of view. The good news is that there is no dharma gate that is not an opportunity for practice, and while the resolution might not be what the small self wants or expects, there’s some amount of being freed from suffering. So often that resolution comes when we realize we created the gate or the barrier in the first place. We set up some expectation that the universe chose not to meet. Now the immediate problem isn’t how to get this thing we’ve been prevented from getting but how to understand the way we create assumptions and then struggle when that’s not the way things go, as if the universe broke a promise. Was there really a gate there, or did I set one up? That doesn’t negate the value of the dharma gate as a chance to develop some insight, but someone else didn’t put that gate in our path, and someone else can’t unlock it. Although these things are opportunities, that doesn’t mean we need to convince ourselves that we should enjoy them or be grateful for them. That’s just another set of ideas about what’s happening. We don’t need to have an opinion or make things feel OK. Nobody wants suffering, and that’s the human condition. To say, I really appreciate the car accident I had, or my sprained ankle, or the disagreement that broke out at the board meeting, because it was a real dharma gate for me is not necessary! Also, if we never resolve whatever the gate is, that’s not failure. Our practice is never complete and we never come to the end of it. That's the practice of vow and repentance. One interesting thing the 108 gates show us is that dharma gates are not always unpleasant, painful events. They've included things like benevolence, joy, stillness, mindfulness, and wisdom. It might not be easy to manifest these things in our daily lives, but they don’t present us with acute suffering we want to overcome. We can learn something from experiencing kind speech, clear beliefs, or good sangha relationships, just as we can when things aren’t going well. The challenge there may be to remember to practice in those moments. Sometimes we fall back on practice simply to manage our suffering. However, dharma gates called truth, generosity and diligence also move us toward embodying or realizing awakening. Whatever we’re experiencing is a dharma gate because every moment is practice. We’ve traveled through 108 of them together over the past eight years. Now it’s time to go out and find the other 83-thousand 9-hundred.  Sanshin's sangha celebrated the end of the 108 Gates series. Questions for reflection and discussion:
The wisdom that leads us from one state to another state is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it], having water sprinkled on the head, we accomplish total wisdom. 從一地至一地智是法明門、潅頂成就一切智故. Ever since Gate 106 we’ve been talking about receiving the assurance that we will all become Buddhas, even Mara and even Devadatta. Gates 108 and 109 are two parts of the same story, so this essay sets us up for the last one. The question we’re being asked to investigate is: how do we become buddha’s children or successors ? The corrolaries are: What is initiation? and What is graduation? In other words, we’re considering the beginning point and the end point of practice. Based on our everyday thinking we'd assume that the first day we get on the cushion, we enter into something and start practicing. We’re beginners, and we spend the rest of our lives learning about Buddhism and the dharma, make some progress toward something, get better at doing Zen, and at some point become a Buddha, probably when we’re taking our last breath. This is the wisdom that leads us from one state to another state. In the early Indian tradition, there are ten bodhisattva stages. These are things that you achieve after arousing bodhicitta, aspiring to practice and making vows. You do various practices over many, many lifetimes and the culmination is that you attain buddhahood. The Chinese developed these ten stages into 52, so there were even more milestones to hit. In the ten-stage system, the first is joy, which you achieve by awakening undefiled wisdom. At some point you reach the stage of non-retrogression, where it’s not possible to slip backward into lower stages, and then it’s a given that you’ll become a Buddha. The highest stage is that of becoming a buddha after one more life. This is the end of line; you’ve done everything you need to do, and when your karma is finished playing itself out, your next stop is buddhahood. In Buddhist cosmology, there’s a special holding pen for bodhisattvas who are at this stage, a green room, if you like. It’s known as Tushita Heaven. There are many heavens and levels of heavens in our tradition; Tushita is part of the karma-dhatu, or the world-system of the Earth, as opposed to a realm like Amitabha’s Pure Land which is a completely separate world-system. Tushita is reachable through practice, and like all other bodhisattvas, Shakyamuni resided there for awhile as Bodhisattva Protector of Illumination before being born as Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha. At the moment, Maitreya is in the Tushita Heaven, waiting to be born as the next Buddha. We don’t know when that will happen, but it could be a very long time. Time runs differently in Tushita: one day and night there equals 400 Earth years. Tushita is where bodhisattvas are poised to become buddhas after a long time of practice. In the beginning, the aspirational figure is Samantabhadra, the bodhisattva of practice, or “great activity.” By the end, the aspirational figure is Maitreya, the future Buddha. The Larger Sutra of Immeasurable Life says: Each of these bodhisattvas, following the virtues of the Mahasattva Samantabhadra, is endowed with the immeasurable practices and vows of the Bodhisattva Path, and firmly dwells in all the meritorious deeds. He freely travels in all the ten quarters and employs skillful means of emancipation. He enters the treasury of the Dharma of the Buddhas, and reaches the Other Shore. Throughout the innumerable worlds he attains Enlightenment. First, dwelling in the Tusita Heaven, he proclaims the true Dharma. Having left the heavenly palace, he descends into his mother’s womb. This is the part of the story we associate with Shakyamuni. He’s up in Tushita, he looks around for someone suitably virtuous to be his mother, chooses Maya, and descends into her womb. The story goes that he takes the form of a white elephant and enters her side, and that his eventual birth is painless for her, without any blood or mess. However, before they leave Tushita, bodhisattvas have to preach the dharma to all the other deities and bodhisattvas in this heaven realm . . . and guess what they preach, according to the Sutra of the Collected Past Deeds of the Buddha? The 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination. These are the circumstances of this text: the bodhisattva calls everyone together and sits on the lion seat to preach the dharma, saying, "My body before long will descend to the human world. I now would like to preach, in their entirety, the gates of Dharma illumination, known as the gates of expedient means for penetrating all dharmas and forms. I will leave them as my last instruction to you, so that you will remember me. If you listen to these gates of Dharma, you will experience joy." There is much rejoicing, and when everyone settlees down, he says: "Now, the 108 gates of Dharma illumination: When bodhisattva mahāsattvas at the place of appointment in one life are in a Tuṣita palace and they are going to descend to be conceived and born in the human world, they must inevitably proclaim, and preach before the celestial multitudes, these 108 gates of Dharma illumination, leaving them for the gods to memorize. After that, they descend to be reborn. Now you must, with utmost sincerity, clearly listen and clearly accept [the 108 gates]. I now shall preach them." Now we can see why the last two gates are about reaching the final bodhisattva stage and becoming a buddha. It’s the occasion for proclaiming these gates in the first place, so there’s an interesting circularity here, which is not uncommon in Buddhist texts. Yet what is this in the gate statement about sprinking water on the head? It sounds pretty Christian, like baptism. Baptism has several functions related to purification and initiation. It’s about wiping away of sin in preparation for being accepted into the church and beginning a new life. In our tradition, Buddha is said to sprinkle water or nectar on the heads of bodhisattvas on their attainment of the tenth stage. The Avatamsaka Sutra says: If one attains the great spiritual powers of the anointed And abides in the most supreme meditations, Then in the presence of the Buddhas One will be annointed and ascend to that rank; One will be anointed with the elixir of deathlessness By all the Buddhas in the ten directions. We can really see the relationship here between sprinking water on the head and accomplishing total wisdom, as the gate statement says. The sutra makes many references to the Buddha annointing bodhisattvas not only with elixir or nectar, but with various virtues and abilities and insights. My guess is that in certain rituals of our tradtition we can read water as standing in for the wisdom or powers that come with these elixirs. In Japanese, this ceremonial sprinking is kanchō or kanjo 灌頂. It’s a term that comes from the Sanskrit abhisheka and it’s older than Buddhism. It’s also part of the Hindu tradition. Abhisheka is a religious ritual in which you pour a liquid offering over an image of a deity while chanting. That liquid might be milk, honey, oil, rose water, or a number of other things. This might feel familiar to you as the part of Buddha’s birthday activities in April where we pour sweet water or tea over the baby Buddha. In China, there’s a water sprinkling festival in April, where people clean the Buddha statues but also splash water on each other for blessings and purification. In Thailand, people sprinkle the monks with perfumed water. In the Vajrayana tradition there’s a process for animal liberation, which includes chanting mantras to bless the water and sprinking it over them to purify negative karma. Thus this pattern shows up in various ways throughout the Buddhist tradition. Pouring on the head can be an offering, but it can also be a consecration or initiation, maybe an empowerment. When a royal person succeeded to power in India, water from each of the oceans was poured out of golden jars onto his head. Within Buddhism, kanjo is most often found in the esoteric or Vajrayana traditions, like Shingon or Tibetan Buddhism. It’s a symbolic transition from one state to another. Pouring water over top of head is a way to declare a legitimate successor and also to initiate someone into practice with a series of empowerments. When it’s an initiation, it’s not like letting someone into a secret society; the symbolism is like watering a seed in the earth. The point is to quicken someone’s progress toward awakening. In the sects that understand buddha nature as the potential for awakening, rather than as awakening itself, this make sense. You want to water that seed to cultivate someone’s spiritual potential. In Shingon, kanjo also confirms that a student has graduated to a higher level of practice. The image is of the teacher pouring wisdom or teachings down to the student. This all makes sense when it’s associated in this gate statement with moving along the bodhisattva path toward buddhahood. Buddha is declaring a true successor. This is part of the world of the authentic transmission of the dharma, which we know was a major theme in Dogen’s teaching and practice. Is this why he included the 108 gates in one version of the Shobogenzo? Maybe -- I don’t know. Other than on Buddha’s birthday, we don’t typically pour things over other things here at Sanshin, so where does all this come in for us? Well, you’ve seen kanjo or abhisheka every time you’ve been here for a jukai-e or a novice ordination. The people receiving precepts offer incense to the Buddha and the preceptor and make three bows. The preceptor invokes the three treasures and a series of buddhas and ancestors, we all chant the ten names of Buddha, the kaitei each receive their rakusu, and then we do the verse of repentence three times. The next thing we have to do is take refuge in the three treasures, but we can’t do that without being completely purified. One part of that purification is the verse of repentence, where we acknowledge and take responsibility for past harmful actions of body, speech and mind, but there’s one more thing we have to do. One by one the kaitei come back up to the preceptor to receive wisdom water. Preceptors make the wisdom water by touching a wand of pine needles to their own heads and then to the water three times. As preceptors, we’re standing in for Buddha. We sit in front of Buddha being a living embodiment of the altar and we put Buddha’s wisdom into the water before putting that on the head of the kaitei. In our tradition, you have to be a transmitted teacher to do this because you’re passing on something that’s been transmitted to you. It’s come down to you all the way from Buddha himself and you’re handing it on to a new generation of practitioners. Each kaitei receives three portions of wisdom water on the head and when we’re all done with this, then preceptors return the wisdom from the water to their own heads To me, if this is a symbolic transition from one state to another, then this water is a purification. We’re receiving some wisdom, and that wisdom is itself a purification. When we see with the eyes of Buddha, we don’t feel compelled to do unwholesome action because we can see that it’s based on delusion. In that moment, we’re purified in a way that goes beyond good and bad. Then we can take the three refuges and the 16 precepts, and at the end of that section, the preceptor says, “Surely you are a child of Buddha,” meaning surely you’re a bodhisattva who will attain buddhahood. The Bonmōkyō says that when we receive the bodhisattva precepts we’re in the same position as buddhas, and we become Buddha’s children. Now we can see the parallel with Buddha sprinkling water on the heads of 10th stage bodhisattvas. When you take lay precepts, you may not feel like an accomplished practitioner who’s ready to come down from Tushita as a Buddha. Here at Sanshin, we highly suggest you practice for a year before taking precepts to make sure that this is the right path for you and that you really want to publicly commit to it. You learn about Buddha’s robe by sewing a rakusu, which takes most people at least several months, and you attend a five-day precepts retreat to learn about them. However, in my experience, most kaitei here are not particularly well-versed in the dharma or deeply experienced in practicing with a sangha, and that’s not a barrier to making a commitment to practice. Rather than being an end point or even a midway point in people’s practice, taking the precepts seems to be a starting point. Folks are stating their intention to develop a practice; it’s an initiation rather than affirming a practice that’s already well-established and well-rounded with zazen, work, study and ritual. What a paradox! You’re just getting started, but Buddha is putting water on your head like a 10th stage bodhisattva and predicting your Buddhahood. How can this be? As we saw at Gate 106, we have to consider Dogen Zenji’s emphasis on practice and awakening not being two. As soon as we sit down in zazen, Buddha is there, not next to us or floating around us, but right there in this body and mind. there’s a saying that zazen is not a practice of human beings, it’s a practice of buddhas, so someone does even a minute of zazen, and Buddha shows up. Do we really need a ritual to make us Buddha’s children? Buddha’s children 仏子(busshi) generally means all practitioners, people who believe in the teachings and do the practice. Sometimes it applies to all living beings, because all beings are buddha nature and all of them are part of the network of dependent origination. In the 3rd chapter of the Lotus Sutra, Shakyamuni says: “This threefold world is all my domain, and the living beings in it are all my children. Now this place is beset by many pains and trials. I am the only person who can rescue and protect others.” From that point of view, we don’t need water sprinkling and formal ceremonies to move us toward buddhahood -- it’s happening anyway -- but there’s something important in the human experience about initiation and graduation. Buddha is extending an invitation: if you want to study the dharma and practice, it’s right here waiting for you. It’s up to you whether or not you accept. This is the approach we take here at Sanshin, which we nickname nonreliance. No one is forcing you to practice, or live by precepts; you have to take it up and commit to it on your own, based on your own bodhicitta. Okumura Roshi has always characterized jukai-e as being about kaitei being willing to be Buddhists in public. You’re no longer a nightstand Buddhist at that point. You’ve stood up in front of other people, accepted the invitation and made the committment. In response, Buddha has sprinkled water on your head and said, Aha -- you’ve finally recognized that you’ve been a bodhisattva all along. Welcome to the group. And by the way, there’s no way out. There’s nothing outside of Buddha’s way. If you practice for awhile and do a lot of discernment and decide you’d like to become ordained clergy in this tradition, you do a ceremony with the same elements as jukai-e including the kanjo, or wisdom water. In the opening remarks, the preceptor says, “This is the ceremony performed simultaneously with all Buddhas, and it is a touchstone for immediate and instantaneous attainment of liberation. Even though the fruit of enlightenment is not yet ripe, a home-leaver is truly a child of the Buddha.” Even though novices are really novices, and they don’t yet know now to manifest awakening and teach the dharma, still, they’re already children of Buddha. Just like the jukai-e, after the novice receives all the robes and bowls, it’s time to take the precepts but first, there’s wisdom water. It always feels to me like the message is: You’re already a purified and perfected Buddha just by showing up here, You’ve already made the committment and given your life to sharing the dharma and enabling people to practice, but let’s do concrete things that make that tangible to you and the sangha. In the human experience, one of the purposes of ritual is to make the history and teachings and stories of a community real. We will probably never see a Buddha in Tushita sprinking nectar on the head of a celestial bodhisattva, but we see the same thing happening every time someone decides to be a public Buddhist, and that’s the way that activity and all its meaning becomes part of our shared experience as a sangha. Questions for reflection and discussion:
The state beyond regressing and straying is a gate of Dharma illumination; for it is replete with the Dharma of past buddhas. 不退轉地是法明門、具足往昔佛法故. In order to understand this gate statement, we need to understand the path of the bodhisattva as it was described in the earlier teachings. In general, there are said to be several stages for the bodhisattva to pass through on the way to becoming a buddha: 1) arousing bodhicitta, the aspiration to practice and experience awakening. 2) practicing wholeheartedly, sometimes the six paramitas, sometimes gaining an understanding of suchness or emptiness, but in any event, actively engaging with the dharma. 3) non-regression, which means that you’re really close to buddhahood, and there’s no going back. 4) you live your final lifetime in samsara before becoming a buddha. The third stage here is what the gate statement is calling "the state beyond regressing and straying," in Sanskrit, avaivartika. In the early texts, these folks are described as exemplary monks, with cognitive powers equal to arhats. They practice deep states of meditation, have perfect wisdom and teach the precepts to others. Their sitting practice is the samadhi that doesn’t grasp anything at all, so they don’t get stuck anywhere/ At Gate 106 we considered receiving a prediction of Buddhahood. If you do good things and practice sincerely, and attain something called the samadhi of heroic progression, you will receive a prediction or an assurance from the Buddha that you will also become a Buddha. These predictions are directly associated with non-regression: you progress in your practice and reach this point, and a buddha will tell you that you will also become a buddha. Those four stages in the path of the bodhisattva mentioned earlier are sometimes expanded into 10 bhumis or stages of attainment, and each one lays the groundwork for the next one. With each one you gain greater power and wisdom. The 8th is called “immovable” because that’s where realization is irreversable. You won’t regress, even after rebirth. There’s no chance you’re going to get wobbly on the path or start backsliding in some way, like having doubts, getting lazy, or trying to get something out of it for yourself. You’re not trying to reach nirvana purely for your own sake. At that point all the klesas or mental afflictions are exhausted, so you’re no longer stuck in samsara and you’re completely absorbed in the dharma. You practice all the paramitas and make various vows for the benefit of others, and those vows themselves bring about additional virtues. Even though you’re working for all beings, you deeply understand no-self and you don’t make mistakes about the nature of the five skandhas. Now, what does that mean? Well, you’re going along practicing the paramitas, mainly generosity because it’s the basis for all the others, and on up through wisdom, but that by itself isn’t enough to get you to non-regression. That only happens when you arouse great compassion for all beings. However, then something interesting happens. Because of wisdom, you know that all dharmas are empty and there really are no beings, and no one to be saved, and at that moment, your compassion starts to weaken. There aren’t any beings toward whom you can feel compassionate. Yet in the same moment, you’re aware of the suffering and misery of deluded individuals in the world that need your help, and your wise vision of emptiness in turn begins to weaken because compassion is rising up again. You’re at the stage of non-regresson because these two things are in balance. Your compassion doesn’t hinder you from deeply seeing emptiness, and your wisdom doesn’t keep you from recognizing suffering and trying to liberate beings, and out of this intersection comes skillful action. Bodhisattvas at this level completely understand emptiness is a way that lets them see reality in a new way. They’re compared to people who’ve woken up from dreams. They’re not confused about causes and conditions and dependent origination, and they don’t even have to think about what skillful action is. They just automatically do the right thing out of wisdom and compassion. It sounds pretty great to reach this rung of the ladder. There are only a couple more levels until we reach buddhahood! That is, unless you’re a follower of Dogen or other teachers who say that practice and awakening are not separate and that practice is not linear. You can’t progress toward Buddha or awakening because Buddha and awakening are already here. In Keisei Sanshoku, or The Sound of the Streams, the Shape of the Mountains, Dogen tells a story about Lingyun Zhiqin (J: Reiun Shigon), who had been practicing for thirty years. He was traveling in the mountains and saw peach blossoms that were blooming in a distant village, and was suddenly awakened and wrote a poem: For thirty years I sought a swordsman. How many times leaves fell and new ones sprouted. Once seeing the peach blossoms, Nothing more to doubt. Even though he’s been practicing for three decades and chasing after awakening, seeing leaves fall every autumn and new ones coming out every spring, he wasn’t there yet. Now he’s seen these peach blossoms and somehow suddenly he gets it. The causes and conditions were both there in that moment for awakening to happen. He showed the poem to his teacher, who said that those who enter through conditions or circimstances never regress. In other words, the teacher acknowledged that the student had experienced awakening through this tangible bit of nature, the blooming of the peach blossoms; he had entered through conditions. Yet Dōgen says, “Does anyone enter except through conditions? Does anyone ever regress?” In other words, there is no other experience or manifestation of awakening except through this tangible world and concrete practice with this human body. Awakening isn’t something "out there," and the things we encounter are no other than Buddha. Does anyone enter except through conditions? What other way is there? Thus, practice and awakening are not two. However, then he asks, does anyone ever regress? Is there really progression and regression? How can there be if in this moment, which is all there is, practice and awakening are both right here? There’s nowhere to get to and nowhere from which to fall away. Sawaki Roshi also said: Progress? Regression? Who knows what goes in the right or wrong direction? What’s good and what’s bad? A cure can be a poison and a poison can be a cure. Suffering is uncomfortable, and yet suffering lets us know that we’re being caught up in delusion and strengthens our aspiration to practice. Being devoted to Buddha’s teachings is great -- until we cling to one or another in a rigid, inflexible way that doesn’t account for impermanence. Becoming mature enough in the practice to take the precepts is fantastic -- until we use the precepts as a yardstick for measuring worth of others. Our teachers are reminding us that none of this is really linear, even when it looks that way. They’ve just taken that nice, convenient step by step plan away from us, but we have to be really careful that we understand what they’re saying without making a mistake. It would be easy to read this as saying that because awakening is already here, we don’t need to practice because there is no progression or regression and anything we want to do is OK. That would be a big misunderstanding. It’s the same question Dogen was working with in his early years: if awakening is already here, why do we need to practice? Yet again, Dōgen says, “Does anyone enter except through conditions?” How can awakening be realized except through practice with this body and mind? Sawaki Roshi ran into this misunderstanding even in his fellow clergy. He told a story once in a talk: When I went to give a talk in a country temple, a young priest asked if he could give an introductory talk before me. “Go ahead,” I said, and listened to his talk. “The principle of Mahayana Buddhism is, this body as it is is Buddha. Since this body as it is is Buddha, there is no need for religious practice, and no need to worry about regressing; whatever you do is OK.” I thought he was making a serious mistake. After that I gave my talk . . . We are all hopelessly deluded, so we have to do something if we want to be Buddhas. We can’t be Buddhas by doing nothing. So there is no meaning in saying ‘this body is Buddha.’” When I said this, contradicting the young priest, he was visibly disturbed. (1) Ouch, right? Imagine being shown up in front of your congregation by Sawaki Roshi. I’ve always wondered why the younger clergy said what he said. Was he trying not to scare the congregation? Was he worried about what Sawaki Roshi might say? By the way, Sawaki Roshi was there to talk about the Fukanzazengi, so everyone should have known he was going to advocate zazen. Here’s the famous Sawaki Roshi to talk about zazen, but don’t worry -- you don’t actually have to DO it! Hmmmmm . . . The young guy wasn’t wrong; this body IS Buddha, but you only realize awakening with it when you sincerely practice. Just reading books or listening to lectures isn’t enough. To return to the gate statement, to be replete is to be complete and lacking nothing. To be beyond regressing and straying is to carry the same dharma as our ancestors, in other words, to fulfill the prediction of Buddhahood. Depending on your branch of Buddhism, being beyond regression comes about either because you’ve developed a powerful practice and particular wisdom or because it’s not possible to regress given that practice and awakening are not two and both are arising in this moment. In any event, we’ve put ourselves into the same space with our ancestors or past Buddhas. We’re doing same zazen and carrying and experiencing the same dharma. The Buddha’s practice is still going on because we’re here doing it. When I’m practicing in Japan I like to imagine all the people who have practiced there in that temple over the last 600 or 800 years. Some of those relics are still there to be seen today, and I’m still wearing the same robes and doing the same practice as they were. Time sort of collapses, and it could really be hundreds of years ago. Sanshin has only been here for 22 years, but still, think of all the people who’ve been in the zendo, in this same space in which we practice now. That’s the zazen space as well as the zendo space. When we say that the absolute sangha is all beings across space and time, we’re recognizing that our sincere aspiration to practice connects us, or makes us replete with the dharma of past buddhas. Notes: (1) Sawaki, Kodo. Discovering the True Self: Kodo Sawaki's Art of Zen Meditation. United States, Catapult, 2020, p. 172-173. Questions for reflection and discussion:
Attainment of realization of the Dharma of nonappearance is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we attain affirmation. 得無生法忍是法明門、得受記故 This gate statement is pointing to the last item in a list of four things called the four assurances of Buddhahood, and these come from the Surangama Samadhi Sutra. In this sutra, Buddha describes fantastic powers or transformational abilities of practitioners who attain a state of meditation called surangama samadhi, or the samadhi of heroic progression, and he’s doing that in order to emphasize cause and effect. If you do good things and practice sincerely, you will receive a prediction or an assurance from the Buddha that you will also become a Buddha. The prediction or assurance of Buddhahood is a common theme throughout the Buddhist tradition. We see it in sutras and also in the tale literature, where its one of the basic elements of story structure. The context for these predictions or assurances within this sutra is that Mara has shown up while Buddha is preaching it, and his objective is to disrupt the teaching. As soon as Buddha started preaching, Mara could hear the sutra but found himself bound and unable to come and make trouble. One of the bodhisattvas asks why Buddha doesn’t keep him from hearing the sutra at all and prevent trouble that way. Buddha says that’s the wrong approach; even hearing the name of the sutra is a cause of future awakening and buddhahood and that’s even true for Mara, so how much more should good people appreciate and practice what’s being taught! One of the bodhisattvas asks whether he can go and help Mara to wake up, and Buddha says, OK, if you think so. The bodhisattva goes to Mara and asks, "Who bound you?" Mara says that as soon as he decided to go disrupt the Buddha, he was bound and couldn’t move. The bodhisattva says that all beings are bound as soon as they’re caught up in their own ideas, delusions and false views, and at the same time, there is nothing that is bound or liberated because a) you’ve done this to yourself and b) there’s no difference between binding and liberation. You won’t get free by destroying false views because true and false are your own idea and your own dichotomy. Mara hatches a plan and tells the bodhisattva that he has aroused bodhicitta and wants to plant good roots, and immediately he’s freed from his bonds. Of course, he doesn’t mean it -- he just wants to get to the Buddha and make trouble. He takes his retinue and goes to the Buddha and demands he teach something else, because this sutra causes him to be bound up. The Buddha asks, "Who untied your bonds?" Mara says that the bodhisattva did. Buddha asks, "What did you promise in return?" Mara says he's promised to arouse bodhicitta. Buddha knows that he’s done this with an ulterior motive and that the same thing is going to happen after he dies; a lot of practitioners are going to try to arouse bodhicitta in order to gain something or imitate others. However, he also knows that this will still be the cause and condition of their awakening, just like Mara. Mara says, "Wait a minute -- I came here with a bad intention, and you’re saying I’m still going to be a Buddha at some point?" Yes -- and the joke's on him. Mara and assembly are puzzled and dismayed by this, so Buddha talks some more about predictions and says that there are four kinds. These are the four assurances of Buddhahood I mentioned earlier. They are:
Let’s take a brief look at each of them and then focus on the fourth one, which is our gate statement for today. The prediction for someone who has not yet aroused bodhicitta is for the person who’s living every day transmigrating through the six realms of samsara but has his wits about him and wants to do the right thing. After many, many lifetimes he’s going to become a bodhisattva and work to save all beings. Buddha already knows what his name will be, what his buddha-fields are going to be like, and what kind of lifespan and legacy he’s going to have. Shariputra points out that if that’s the case, then it doesn’t do for us ever to disparage anyone, because we have no idea where he or she is on the path and how close to Buddhahood someone may actually be. Only Buddha can see that, and if we become judgemental, we can hurt ourselves. Buddha says this is absolutely right. You don’t know who’s in front of you. It might be a Buddha. As for the prediction for someone who has just aroused bodhicitta, Buddha says there are people who have established good roots and are practicing the paramitas. At this point, their progress is irreversable and it’s an absolute certainty that they they will leap off the wheel of transmigration and be Buddhas. Again, only the Buddha knows their names and fields and legacies. The prediction made unbeknownst to the practitioner himself is what happens when others wonder what’s happening with someone. The practitioner is steadily embodying the paramitas and moving towards Buddhahood, and has no doubts or reservations, but others want to know how long it will take and what his name will be and how many fields he will have. In order to put their doubts to rest, Buddha makes a prediction, but not in front of this practitioner. Finally, in the prediction made in the presence of one who has attained the realization of the Dharma of nonappearance, the practitioner has been practicing for a very long time, has established good roots and a lot of good karma, sees everything clearly and deeply, knows all about no-self and emptiness, and knows very well that ultimately, dharmas do not arise and perish. Buddha knows that he’s perfected wisdom and gained all possible merit, so in front of everyone, all the bodhisattvas, devas and brahmas, he makes a public prediction that so and so will have this name, fields, legacy and timeframe. Now even though this practitioner is overjoyed to get this prediction directly from Buddha, it seems it’s not actually for his own benefit. When everyone else hears the prediction, they themselves wake up in imitation of him. As we get close to the end of this list of 108 dharma gates, we can see some threads starting to come together in this number 106. All the elements and practices that this sutra describes as being part of this path to awakening have been covered already by the rest of the 108 gates. In just this summary, I’ve mentioned not having selfish or gaining ideas in undertaking practice, understanding that there’s no difference between samsara and nirvana, believing in cause and effect, that good things happen when we plant good roots, and practicing paramitas, like giving, making effort and cultivating wisdom. This is all familiar territory for us. Back at Gate 51, we also talked about the realization of non-apppearance: Realization of nonappearance is a gate of Dharma illumination; for[with it] we experience the truth of cessation. We learned there that realization of nonappearance is the recognition and acceptance that nothing really arises or perishes, which is another way to say that all conditioned phenomena are empty, and the truth of cessation is another way to say Nirvana. At Gate 51, "realization of the dharma of non-appearance" leads to Nirvana. In this gate 106 it leads to assurance, or a prediction of Buddhahood. Although this gate is referring only to the fourth of the Four Assurances, I think it’s really alluding to or including the whole set. The first time I encountered prediction as an element of this tradition was on one of my earliest trips to Japan, when I was with a group visiting Hokyoji in Fukui. As an aside, Hokyoji was founded by Jakuen, a Chinese monk who came to practice with Dogen at Eiheiji and left there after he died. This is a really historically important temple. When we arrived, the head of the temple came to give us a few remarks, and he predicted that we would all be Buddhas. I was really struck by that at the time, given who he was and what temple he was running. We were a bunch of straggly looking Westerners that had just arrived in his temple, but he seemed pretty confident! It’s important to know that when we hear predictions that we or others will be Buddhas, that’s not a comment on our own virtue or worthiness. That’s a comment on the efficacy of the Buddha’s wisdom and teaching. According to the Lotus Sutra, someone who hears one phrase of dharma or arouses even a moment of aspiration will become a Buddha, and even Devadatta, a pretty evil character in the Buddhist tradition, receives this prediction. Devadatta was Shakyamuni’s cousin, and these two had some karmic affinity lifetime after lifetime. He specialized in opposing everything the Buddha did. He tried to split the sangha and take it over, and even to murder the Buddha at one point, attacking him with poisoned thorns. Yet somehow in the sutra, Devadatta is a bodhisattva who helps Shakyamuni to realize awakening. The Buddha says that in a past life, Devadatta was his teacher. This story is interpreted in various ways. One is that it’s an illustration of the nonseparation of good and evil. Shakyamuni and Devadatta are interconnected in some way life after life. Each of them does both wholesome and unwholesome things over the course of time. Another interpretation is that Devadatta was really a great bodhisattva because he was intentionally racking up bad karma in order to push Shakyamuni and others toward awakening. If that’s the case, then we can see how Buddha can predict that he will become a Buddha in a future life. Devadatta is just one example of the myriad predictions of Buddhahood in the Lotus Sutra. Buddha starts with Mahakashyapa, his most accomplished disciple, and gives him a specific prediction: In a future life, this disciple of mine, Maha-Kashyapa, will go before three million billion world-honored buddhas, making offerings to them, revering, honoring, and praising them, and proclaiming the innumerable great teachings of the buddhas everywhere. In his final incarnation he will be able to become a buddha whose name will be Radiance Tathagata, one worthy of offerings, truly awakened, fully clear in conduct, well gone, understanding the world, unexcelled leader, trainer of men, teacher of heavenly beings and people, buddha, world-honored one. His land will be called Radiant Virtue, and his eon will be named Magnificently Adorned. The lifetime of this buddha will be twelve small eons… His land will be magnificently adorned, free of all evil pollution, rubble, thorns or thistles, and filthy toilet waste. The land will be level and smooth, with no high or low places, hills or valleys. The ground will be lapis lazuli. Lines of jeweled trees and golden cords will mark off its roads. It will have precious flowers scattered over it. And the whole place will be pure and clean. The bodhisattvas of that land will be innumerable hundreds of billions, and there will be innumerable shravakas. There will be no deeds of the devil there, and, though the devil and the devil’s people will be there, they will all defend the Buddha-dharma. It's pretty encouraging, not only for Mahakasyapa but for all the other beings who were listening. On hearing this, each level and layer of beings all want their own prediction of Buddhahood, and now the point of all this becomes Buddha dispelling their doubts. Another group of high-level disciples all plead sincerely for a prediction, and it's interesting that these aren’t beginners but really experienced practitioners. Buddha makes another set of very specific predictions for them. Next are 500 of the top arhats, then 1200 more arhats, then 2000 lesser disciples, including Ananda. Then we get to Shakyamuni’s mother and 6000 nuns, and finally to his wife. Now at last everyone is reassured and at peace. Everyone knows that even though it’s going take many, many lifetimes, eventually they’ll have lovely buddha-lands, and names like Seen with Joy by All the Living Tathagathas, or Having Ten Million Shining Characteristics. As I mentioned, predictions of Buddhahood are also an important element in Buddhist tale literature starting with the avadanas in India and carrying through to the bukkyo setsuwa genre in Japan. These sometimes have their origins in the Vinaya or the sutras, but they’re not high-class literature aimed at scholars and clergy. They’re designed to be accessable and to popularize the teachings, so some of these stories were written as stories, outside of the canon. Buddhist miracle tales were a particular interest of mine in grad school, and in my experience these tales are really unexplored territory in North American dharma centers. I get why, because they’re tales of the fantastic, and we modern Westerners pride ourselves on not being superstitious. In a broad sense, the avadanas fall into the ethics or sila element of prajna-sila-samadhi; they outline a sort of moral code. They’re about good and bad deeds and the results of those actions, so there’s also a strong underlying theme of belief in cause and effect and that’s a foundational element for us and one of Dogen’s main themes. Many avadanas have a three-part structure:
These stories were designed to teach and spread the dharma in a time and place where people didn’t read and study. They had all they could do to raise families and farm and run businesses, but like all humans, they were suffering and they wanted that to stop. There were any number of spiritual teachers and practices around, and I’m sure one of the purposes of the stories was to show how wonderful Buddhism was: do good and follow the teachings and you too will become a Buddha. The people in the stories weren’t all rich and powerful; there were poor people, lepers, and folks who were deeply deluded. Some were animals, particularly food animals who go to Buddha for refuge, and somehow, even a moment of good intention leads to a good outcome. Here’s an example, though this one doesn’t exactly follow the 3-part structure. The Buddha is going on his alms-round and a brahman’s daughter sees him. She realizes who he is and offers some barley meal. Buddha smiles and emits various rays of light; what these look like indicates what kind of prediction he’s going to make about someone. He asks Ananda, "Did you see that girl who had a moment of faith and offered me this barley meal?" Yes, he'd seen her. "Because of this virtue, she will not suffer karmic downfall for 13 eons, and after transmigrating around and around in the highest three levels of samsara, in her last life she will become a buddha named Supra-ni-hita." Meanwhile her husband comes back from the forest, where he’d been gathering flowers and firewood. He hears that she’s made this offering and received a prediction of Buddhahood, and he’s infuriated. He goes to the Buddha and accuses him of lying in order to get offerings. Who’s going to believe that just giving this bit of meal is going to make you a buddha? Well, the Buddha asks, how big is a seed? As big as a tree? No. So isn’t it pretty amazing that a tiny seed can turn into a huge tree? And see, he had the marks of Buddha -- would a Buddha tell lies, even for the sake of hundreds of thousands of kingdoms? By the end of the conversation, the husband has heard a discourse on the four noble truths and aroused bodhicitta and become Buddha’s disciple. In Japanese Buddhist tale literature, prediction takes the form of revelation. Buddha is no longer on earth to give predictions personally. The main character is often engaged in some kind of regular devout practice, sometimes while continuing to do other unwholesome things. The arc of the story is usually that he has a strange dream or meets with an unusual being who gives instructions. When the instructions are followed or the events of the dream come to pass, the being that has appeared is revealed to be a bodhisattva, usually either Kannon or Jizo. The person ordains and when he dies, there are mysterious clouds and lovely fragrances and he’s reborn in the Pure Land and greeted by Amida. Why do we care about predictions or assurance of Buddhahood, and how do we practice with that? One way this comes down to us is through Dogen’s emphasis on practice and awakening not being two. As soon as we sit down in zazen, Buddha is there, not next to us or floating around us, but right there in this body and mind. There’s a saying that zazen is not a practice of human beings, it’s a practice of buddhas, so if someone does even a minute of zazen, Buddha shows up. We can see this as a prediction and as a support to our faith in the three treasures and in the practice. From this perspective, we don’t have to wait for myriad lifetimes for the prediction to come true. We don’t have to be reborn in a special place or escape our current life circumstances. There’s a place in the ceremony of receiving lay precepts, after the 16 precepts have been received and the lineage papers have been bestowed, in which the preceptor says: When living beings receive the Buddhas’ Precepts, they immediately join the Buddhas. When their state is identical to Great Enlightenment, they are truly the children of the Buddhas. Simply wholeheartedly vowing to keep the precepts, even though we know we’re going to break them, is enough to let us join the Buddhas. Mara aroused bodhicitta with an ulterior motive, with no intention of following through, and he still got a prediction. Devadatta tried to murder the Buddha, so talk about not honoring the three treasures -- and he still got a prediction. When we realize the dharma of non-appearance, when we understand emptiness and stop clinging to things. We go straight to Nirvana as Buddhas, straight to our own buddha fields of peace and contentment, but that field isn’t somewhere else -- it’s right here. If we can see with eyes of Buddha, we can see jewel trees and golden cords, and unpleasant, undesirable things also disappear from our buddha field. Why? Because we’re not labeling, judging, chasing and running away. The message of this gate is simple: if we live wholesome lives and practice sincerely, none of us will fail to become Buddhas. Questions for reflection and discussion:
Endurance of obedient following is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we obey the Dharma of all the buddhas. 順忍是法明門、順一切佛法故. Elsewhere, this "endurance of obedient following" (junnin) is translated "tolerance of accordance," so we're in the realm of endurance, tolerance, patience and forbearance. The central word here is the Sanskrit kshanti with a root meaning of "having capacity," the ability to function in the midst of something. In Japanese, the endurance of obedient following is one of the gonin, the five kinds of endurance, or five tolerances. There are myriad lists of tolerances in the Buddhist tradition, so we have to be careful not to get tangled up. This list of five comes from a text called the Sutra for Humane Kings, a fairly influential text in East Asia that is supposed to be a translation of an Indian text, but was really written in China and Korea. It's technically part of the prajna paramita literature, but actually a blend with Yogacara and other kinds of teachings. Interestingly, this is not a text aimed at practitioners, either lay or ordained, but aimed at rulers. Where usually the questioners in sutras are arhats or bodhisattvas, in this case it’s kings. Also, rather than overtly focusing on zazen and prajna, it’s about humaneness and forbearance, the most applicable religious virtues for governing a state. We’ll come back to this sutra shortly so we can dig into this alignment of kings and bodhisattvas through endurance or patience. The text lists the five kinds of tolerance to be cultivated: 1) self-control, working to loosen the grip of the three poisons. 2) firm belief, or faith in practice and the three treasures, knowing that good deeds lead to good consequences, or we could say, belief in cause and effect, which happens to be a very important teaching point for Dogen and Soto Zen. 3) patient progress towards the end of all mortality. 4) [the realization of] the birthlessness of phenomena. In other words, in the absolute sense there is no birth and death, or arising and perishing, or coming and going. 5) extinction, the patience that leads to complete nirvana, when we finally extinguish the fires of the three poisons that started with self-control, the first thing on this list. The kanji in our gate statement that are translated there as endurance of obedient following are somehow translated in this list of five tolerances as the third one, patient progress toward the end of all mortality. How are these the same thing? The overall sense of this thing is being intellectually receptive to the nature of the dharma. We “endure” or tolerate putting aside our own views and being in accord with reality, listening to and remembering what Buddha taught and then gently and patiently putting that into practice. There’s a real sense that this is not about being tough or being a martyr. It’s not that kind of “endurance” In order to get the whole picture, we need some context. In early Buddhist teachings, patience was about following a linear path of various kinds of training. There are stages of meditation and you sort of climb the ladder, moving toward liberation and leaping off the wheel of life and death, so we can see where “patient progress toward the end of all mortality” comes from. As we know, even though in Zen we hear things like awakening is already here and zazen is good for nothing, practice is still a lifelong endeavor. We can’t sit down once or twice, have a flash of some kind of peak experience, and then we’re cooked. There’s a lot we have to learn and unlearn, and gradually we untwist our karma and delusion and unwholesome habits, and then we can recognize awakening and reality and act on that basis. We also have to bring into this conversation kshanti-paramita, or the perfection of patience. There are six paramitas, or perfections, common to all of Buddhism: generosity, ethical discipline, patience, effort, concentration, and wisdom. The paramita of patience has three aspects: - tolerance toward other living beings - tolerance of circumstances - tolerance that comes from wisdom and insight into the essence of reality Tolerance toward other living beings Okumura Roshi has explained that in the Mahayana tradition in general. endurance or patience is the practice of laypeople. In a monastery patience is not considered so important because monks are assumed to have similar values and aspirations. Laypeople are in greater contact with people who have different philosophies and ways of thinking. For this they need patience. For a bodhisattva, patience is one of the most important practices. (1) However, anyone who’s practicing in a training temple needs an incredible amount of patience and diligence in folding into or being in accord with what's happening, particularly if you’re a foreigner. People in the training temple are just as human as anyone else! This endurance of obedient following is a real open question for us in North America today, as it has been since Soto Zen arrived here a hundred years ago. In these days and circumstances, which are very different than those where Soto Zen originated, what does it look like to follow Buddha obediently? Can we keep the spirit and intention of our ancestors even though our practice may look different on the surface because of our culture? Okumura Roshi has talked about how living in America as a foreigner requires a great deal of patience on his part. American Buddhist practitioners who practice with teachers from Japan or other Asian Buddhist countries must need the same sort of patience. Actually, any two people who live or work together will sometimes have conflicts and need to practice patience. Of course, this is just one example of tolerance toward other living beings. We’ve all got plenty of personal experience with being annoyed with bugs or weeds in the garden, noisy neighbors, incompetent coworkers, selfish family members or decisionmakers that don’t do what we want. There are plenty of irksome people in our lives, bless 'em. Tolerance of circumstances One way to understand suffering is that we want things to be other than what they are, and we somehow assume that the universe has made a contract with us that things will go as we expect. The universe doesn’t care what we want or think; it’s just functioning. Tolerance of circumstances doesn’t mean we don’t work for change when that’s necessary. It means that we accept what’s unfolding without looking away or being in denial about what’s going on. If we don’t examine our circumstances carefully and pay attention to cause and effect, we can’t work for change effectively and we can’t operate in accord with the dharma. Tolerance that comes from wisdom and insight into the essence of reality This is real endurance of obedient following, being completely in accord with the dharma. The bodhisattva that embodies all of these three aspects of patience sympathizes with living creatures, understands their problems, sees how they think and respond and what they can take in and process, and can discern the real reasons for their behavior. “Obeying” the dharma of all buddhas is same kanji as obedient following, in other words, being in accord with the teachings of our ancestors means being in accord with reality. Let’s return to the Sutra for Humane Kings that listed the five kinds of tolerance, including ours. The text sets up a parallel or similarity between the virtuous ruler and the bodhisattva. The ruler’s main virtue is in his relations in society and how he protects and transforms those relations. Bodhisattvas are also regarded as kings and are also focused on protection and transformation, but of all beings rather than just one society. They cultivate qualities or virtues that support their practice and the manifestation of buddha nature. According to the sutra, the basis of cultivating the virtues necessary for both rulers and bodhisattvas is the perfection of forbearance, endurance, patience and tolerance, so it includes list of five forbearances, of which the third is found in our gate statement, endurance of obedient following. The text makes use of a pun in Chinese where the word for humaneness and the word for forbearance has the same sound. We can see how it’s setting up the parallel between the humane ruler and the bodhisattva who has cultivated patience. It also makes reference to one of the Jataka Tales, stories of Shakyamuni’s previous lives, called "The Preacher of Forbearance.” In this life, Buddha is an ascetic who practices the perfection of patience. The local king believes that he’s lured his concubines away and harasses him and physically assaults him pretty mercilessly, but Buddha wins in the end because he refuses to become angry at this injustice and shows his inward mastery of forbearance. The king, on other hand, has shown his complete lack of mastery over himself or anyone else, even though it appears outwardly that he has power. The sutra makes the point that both the humane king and the bodhisattva as the king of forbearance are engaged in the transformation of people. Both of them cultivate and protect their “states.” For the king, the state is the nation and its functioning. For the bodhisattva, its his personal condition. We can see a connection here between inner and outer mastery or authority or, we might say, wisdom and skillful or beneficial action. We have the outer kingship of benevolently ruling a nation, and we have the inner kingship of patience and all of the other paramitas that form the basis of embodying awakening and ruling ourselves. The king works for the good of his people and the bodhisattva works for the good of all beings. The sutra sets up a hierarchy that says that the more buddha-fields in which a bodhisattva lives, the greater a king he is and the more heavenly realms over which he presides. It says, “This is what is meant by Bodhisattva-mahasattvas appearing as kings in order to transform and guide [sentient beings].” Although it might looks like kings and bodhisattvas are on separate paths, it’s simply a difference of appearance; they’re actually doing the same thing. The “outer” common goal of the humane king involves the transformation of the state, while the “inner” goal is the cultivation of Buddhahood and the transformation of sentient beings through forbearance. In this forbearance, there is certainly an element of being patient with people’s shortcomings or mistakes. The sutra says, “Hearing of good he is not overjoyed, hearing of bad he is not angry.” Yet we can’t forget the aspect of “endurance of obedient following.” The sutra equates being a humane king with explaining the dharma and modeling and encouraging virtue. In order to assume any kind of mastery, we have to be in accord with dharma, to put aside our own stuff and commit to following and integrating the teachings. The title of “king” goes with self-transformation first, and "humane king" goes with being able to protect the state. That happens because the humane king puts things in order according to the dharma, but he does this in an evenhanded, quiet, unobtrusive way. He is protected from making mistakes because of obedient following and the state is protected as well. In this sutra, the goal of both the humane king and the bodhisattva is inner transformation that manifests outwardly as skillful action. There’s another layer that’s being alluded to here as well, and that’s the Two Truths, or the relative and absolute, or form and emptiness. We have the king working in the world and the bodhisattva functioning in emptiness, and also, these two realms and two people are the same. Because these two realms and two people are functioning according to the endurance of obedient following, they’re both empty. In other words, they have no permanent self-nature because the causes and conditions that lead to their arising are always changing. If we put ourselves in the place of the humane king and the bodhisattva and consider what they’re aspiring to do, to cultivate some mastery of themselves and their situations for the good of others as well as themselves, and then remember that all around them everything is changing all the time and there’s nothing they can really hold onto, well, that certainly takes some patience! Say I’ve come up with this great project that’s going to change lives and I’m really committed to it. I’m working hard to gather the resources and build the relationships, and I’m making some progress in helping people. Then a tornado comes along and flattens the facility we’re building and we have to start all over. Holy mackerel! How do you not get frustrated and discouraged? Yet there’s no one to blame; a tornado is simply the universe doing what the universe does, and we can see that only if we’re engaged in obedient following and not getting caught up in the impatience that can go with self-involvement and the three poisons Moment by moment, anything and everything can change, despite our best risk management efforts, and it can sure feel like nirvana is pretty far away. Still, bodhisattvas know that there’s no use getting impatient because it won’t change anything. It can’t move samsara and nirvana any closer together because no matter what it looks like, they’re both right here. We might think of endurance or patience as something that’s abstract, but actually, we have to remember that it’s something we practice. That means it’s related to the things with which we create karma: body, speech and mind. Thought leads to speech and action, and we can attune ourselves to feeling when impatience is arising and remember that probably our impatience is based on not being in accord with the dharma and having some expectations that universe isn’t meeting at the moment. However, endurance of obedient following is not about feeling like we’re under the thumb of some outside force or a power hungry dictator. Probably the dictator is really our own ego, but be that as it may . . . “Endurance” might make us think that we need to be martyrs or to put up with unfair treatment. Endurance is not better than action. It shouldn’t paralyze us in carrying out our vows; that’s not obedient following. Okumura Roshi has reminded us: We should try to see the whole situation and do what is best for everyone. If we aim only for patience, we may harm ourselves or others. Patience alone can be a kind of poison. It can make the situation worse. (2) It’s really about seeing clearly what the universe is doing and what’s really happening beyond what we expect or want to happen. We may be surprised to know that one of the names of a rakusu or okesa is the robe of patience, but really, what better opportunity do we have for obedient following than when we’re wearing Buddha’s robe and Buddha’s teaching? We’ve got it actually, physically wrapped around our bodies and we’re in intimate contact with it. This is another matter of protection, protecting our practice and attitude. The robe of forbearance or endurance comes from the tenth chapter of the Lotus Sutra called "Teacher of the Law." In addition to the cloth robe, it’s an image or symbol of putting on the spirit of forbearance required to teach the sutra. The robe protects against external hindrances, both physically and mentally. The sutra refers to the robe of gentleness and patience and says that if you want to preach the sutra after Shakyamuni’s death, you should put on the Thus Come One’s robe, and that this robe is the mind that is gentle and forbearing so the robe and patience are the same thing. There are three essentials for preaching the Lotus Sutra: the robe, the seat, and the room of the Thus Come One, or Buddha. All are aspects of mind that one puts on, if you will, before teaching. The sutra says: These good men and good women should enter the Thus Come One’s room, put on the Thus Come One’s robe, sit in the Thus Come One’s seat, and then for the sake of the four kinds of believers [i.e., monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen] broadly expound this sutra. The ‘Thus Come One’s room’ is the state of mind that shows great pity and compassion toward all living beings. The ‘Thus Come One’s robe’ is the mind that is gentle and forbearing. The ‘Thus Come One’s seat’ is the emptiness of all phenomena.” Before we share the dharma, we bring forth our gentleness, forbearance, wisdom and compassion. The robe helps us to be in accord with and embody the Buddha’s teachings. It takes patience and endurance to study and construct a rakusu or okesa. You make a mistake and have to take stitches out and try again. Even if you know about regular sewing, sometimes it’s not easy, and in fact I think it’s harder because of the assumptions you make. This is not like everyday sewing in technique or attitude. You have to put aside your desire to make an art project or something impressive, or copy some cool thing you saw someone else wear. In this family, we’re very careful to carry on what Sawaki Roshi taught during his 20th century nyoho-e movement, so if you make a robe here, you’ll need to endure your disappointment about not making something else. It can be a real practice of obedient following. When I made my zagu for transmission, I copied the commercial Sotoshu zagu because I didn’t realize it was different from one made according to nyoho. Eventually, some years later, I took it apart and replaced all the white fabric with grey. If anyone should be an obedient follower of our family style, it should be the person heading up the practice here! Was it a nuisance? Sure. Yet it was important to be patient with it for the sake of other people who would see it and think white fabric in a zagu was OK. If you’ve studied robe sewing here with Yuko, you’ve heard the phrase ehou ichinyo, the robe and the dharma are one. Putting a robe on this body is a skillful action toward saving all beings. We can’t help but engage in obedient following when we wear it. Overall, the message of today’s gate is: be patient with the practice. It’s no fun to get up at 3:30 am to start sesshin at 4 am, but that’s what the sangha is doing. It takes putting down that interesting thing you’re doing and getting on a cushion here or at home, but we do it because it’s time to do it and the bell is ringing. It’s hard to let go of our deeply held delusion and our self-clinging, but that’s the practice of a bodhisattva, and that’s what we’ve vowed to do. Notes: (1) Okumura, S. (2012). Living by Vow: A Practical Introduction to Eight Essential Zen Chants and Texts. United Kingdom: Wisdom Publications, p. 137 (2) Living by Vow, p. 138 Questions for reflection and discussion:
Attainment of the state of unrestricted speech is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we cause all living beings totally to rejoice. 得無礙辯是法明門、令一切衆生皆歡喜故. Now you might be thinking that we’ve considered this gate already, because we dealt with the state of unrestricted speech back at Gate 101: Entry into the state of unrestricted speech is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we attain realization of the Dharma-eye. That one was about teaching the dharma, or discussing the Buddha’s teachings, as bodhisattvas from a place of unrestrictedness using the dharma eye. Gate 102 was about entering into all conduct as the complete, unhindered functioning of the universe, and Gate 103 was about dharani as memory as well as an incantation: remembering to see beyond our individual delusion and see clearly how the universe really works. Here we are again at Gate 104 with unrestricted speech. Gates 101 and 104 about unrestricted speech are bookending gates about memory and conduct. That says to me we’re considering body, speech and mind, the three things that create karma. When we think about it, the first round of unrestricted speech was a manifestation of wisdom. This one is a manifestation of compassion, bringing joy and delight to people. Let’s review briefly what we've learned about unrestricted speech so far. It comes from the point of view of unobstructed wisdom or prajna, and it's how we speak and teach when we act from a place of seeing clearly and deeply understanding impermanence, interdependence and the emptiness of the five skandhas . “Entering into” or attaining in this context is to drop off body and mind, to realize that there’s already no separation so there’s already no restriction or hindrance. What’s keeping us from entering into or attaining is our five skandhas clinging to five skandhas. If we can let go of the clinging, we easily “enter into” or attain. Unrestricted speech is not just about saying whatever we want without feeling held back or unsure. The restriction isn’t about not having courage or motivation or begrudging the dharma; it’s about not getting tripped up by the three poisons. "Unrestricted" here is muge 無礙, without hindrance. You might recognize it from the Hannya Shingyo: ko shin mu kei ge mu kei ge ko mu u ku fu, or Thus the mind is without hindrance. Without hindrance, there is no fear. This is the bodhisattva’s experience of emptiness, and indeed, this unrestrictedness is said to be a defining characteristic of emptiness (if we can say that there is any way to define or describe emptiness). The Mahaparinirvana Sutra has a lot to say about unhindered-ness and language in the functioning of the bodhisattva. On the basis of understanding emptiness, the bodhisattva gains the four unhindered-nesses: unhindered-ness in dharma, meaning, language and eloquence. The sutra says: In the unhindered knowledge of dharmas, one knows all things and their names. In the unhindered knowledge of meaning, one knows all about the meaning of things [of the Dharma], arriving at the meaning by the names established for them. In unhindered knowledge of language, one knows the morphological, phonological, prosodical, and oratorical aspects of words. In unhindered knowledge of eloquence, the Bodhisattva-mahasattva has no hindrance in oratory, and is unmoved. He has no fear, and it is difficult to defeat him. Let’s take these one by one. Unhindered knowledge of dharmas: Bodhisattvas know all the things we encounter at all various levels and stages of awakening, how we encounter name and form, taking things in through the sense gates and provisionally putting labels on them. It’s said they uphold the words of dharma and don’t forget them. The sutra says: Upholding is like [the actions of] the earth, mountains, eyes, clouds, man, and mother. The same is the case with all things. When we read this, we think: how do the earth and eyes and mothers uphold the dharma? They simply fully carry out their dharma position without having ideas about that and being hindered by craving and aversion. We have to move through the world being able to distinguish candy from medicine and a red light from a green light, and we have to be able to talk about the dharma in order to help people to practice, even though language is limited. Bodhisattvas don’t forget the words of the dharma and they don’t forget to practice. Unhindered knowledge of meaning: Bodhisattvas know that although there appear to be three vehicles -- the Theravada, the Mahayana and the Vajrayana -- these are actually all one vehicle. There’s really only one dharma, one way the universe really works, but we have to explain and understand the dharma according to conditions. It seems to mean different things depending on what we’re able to take in and work with at any given time. Bodhisattvas don’t attach fixed meaning to the names of vehicles or the names of anything, so they understand the real meaning, or what things really signify. They don’t get stuck and blinded by their own interpretation. In other words, they know the functions of things are not just what we assign to them. They can let go of the “what’s in it for me” approach and see the real dharma positions of things and what they’re really doing. Unhindered knowledge of language: Bodhisattvas can give endless different names to things depending on the situation in order to speak in a relevant way. When we can’t describe something in language, like emptiness or awakening, sometimes we have to use similes or metaphors, or if we’re explaining something to someone who has no experience of something similar, we can say, “In a way, it’s like this other thing that you already know about.” Different names can illuminate different aspects of the same thing, and bodhisattvas don’t get stuck with just one point of view. They can see and appreciate this name and viewpoint, but also all the others, like a hall of mirrors that reflect each other, or like Indra’s net, where all dharmas are connected to each other and reflect each other. Again, the teaching is “no fixed meaning.” Unhindered knowledge of eloquence: Bodhisattvas, in the course of innumerable kalpas, talk about all dharmas to all beings, using endless names, meanings and ideas. They can talk to anyone at any time about anything without getting tired or running out of material, stories, examples or illustrations. At first, we might think of someone we know who never seems to get tired of talking, but I’d suggest that an important aspect of eloquence is also knowing when to be silent, when you’ve said enough and someone needs time to take it in, or when words are just not the right tools. Bodhisattvas have complete knowledge of each of these four things, all the nuances and subsets and what to do in every case, and yet, every time, Buddha says they don’t cling to anything about them. They know that the way they use language is the best and most effective, but they don’t cling to any approach or technique. They’re ready to give it up or switch to something else at any time, and they know that the dharma can’t really be expressed in words, but they do it anyway. Someone asked Buddha how there can be knowing if there is no clinging. How can we say we know about these things and are able to make use of them if we’re not grasping them? He says: Clinging is not unhinderedness. Where there is no clinging, there is unhinderedness. Hence, any Bodhisattva who has any clinging is not one unhindered. If not unhindered, he is no Bodhisattva. Know that such a person is a common mortal. He goes on to say that ordinary people cling to their five skandhas, and that leads to greed, which leads to suffering and being bound to the samsaric world of birth and death. In other words, they’re not liberated from suffering like the bodhisattva, so ordinary people don’t have four unhindered-nesses of the bodhisattva and they’re unable to offer the unrestricted speech that this gate says leads living beings to rejoice. This unrestricted speech of the bodhisattva is based in a complete understanding and awareness of emptiness. As we saw in the Heart Sutra, it’s the mind without hindrance, and again, this isn’t just everyday speech; this is particularly about sharing the dharma although there are myriad ways that that happens and we’re all engaged in it in some way. We’ve spent plenty of time over course of all these gates talking about speech. The new wrinkle this time is that this kind of speech results in delight and joy for others. This delight and joy is not the pleasure we get from taking in fun and exciting sensations through the body and then chasing after more. It’s not about just helping folks get more chocolate cake and cherry pie. This kind of joy specifically refers to the skillful operation of the sixth level of consciousness, so now we need to briefly review what these levels of consciousness are, and for that we can return to the Heart Sutra because that’s familiar territory for us. The sutra lists the five skandhas that make up this thing called “I” -- form, feeling, perception, formation and consciousness -- then it lists the six sense gates: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. Then it intersects those two lists to make six kinds of consciousness. Each one is the connection between consciousness and one of the sense gates: eye consciousness, ear, nose, tongue, body and mind. It’s the sixth one, mind consciousness, that we’re concerned with related to delight and joy. Mind consciousness involves awareness, recognition and memory, and uses them to understand all the other five consciousnesses, i.e. to understand eye consciousness, or what’s coming in visually, to understand ear consciousness, or what’s coming in audibly, etc. Something comes in through the sense of smell, it’s something I’ve smelled before and I recognize that it’s incense, or fresh oranges, or fish. I remember what to do with that, and maybe I take some action. There can be some part of that process where I decide whether or not I personally like or dislike that smell and I have an opinion about it, but that isn’t a requirement. I can recognize something and take action about it without getting caught up in my own story and distorting that experience. That’s when joy and delight arises that’s not based on my personal self-clinging, and that’s the kind of rejoicing in the gate statement. How can we speak in such a way that others arouse joy that’s based on wisdom and compassion and not on the three poisons? We talked about sympathetic joy all the way back at Gate 16 as one of the four brahma viharas, or divine abodes. The classical image of sympathetic joy is the joy of a parent when the child grows and develops and prospers. Parents feel very connected to their children, so they’re happy when they learn to walk and talk, do well in school, get a date for the prom, get a good job. How do we cultivate or create the conditions for this sympathetic joy? It’s actually not so easy to be happy for someone else without some little bit of envy. Why her and not me? Why don’t I get what I want and need? It’s the usual five skandhas clinging to five skandhas and creating suffering. Sometimes it seems like our contentment and someone else’s contentment can’t co-exist. If he gets something, that comes at my own expense. If she’s happy, it shows me how unhappy I am. It’s so easy to pull out the yardstick and start measuring and comparing as if there’s a finite amount of joy in the world and we have to fight each other for it. The bodhisattva understands that there is no independent, fixed self that needs to be defended, so one person’s happiness doesn’t have to be a threat to someone else’s happiness. It doesn’t hurt me to be happy for you when something good happens. If we practice and loosen the grip of this idea that there is a fixed and unchanging self nature that persists through time and that we need to defend, we are naturally able to feel others’ joy. Sympathetic joy doesn’t mean we can’t be happy for ourselves when good experiences come along, or that others can’t celebrate with us. It does mean that we’re not so caught up in our own craving and aversion that the only pleasure and delight we get comes from our own ideas. Sawaki Roshi said, In everything, people follow their feelings of joy, anger, sadness and comfort. But that’s something different from everyday mind. Everyday mind means cease-fire. Without preferences, without animosity, without winner and loser, without good and evil, without joy and pain – that’s everyday mind. Cease-fire -- that’s interesting. We can let go of this burning need to win. We can live without winners and losers, good and evil, using everyday mind or seeing the way the bodhisattva sees, from the perspective of emptiness. Cease-fire is the unhindered-ness of the bodhisattva, as we saw a minute ago, and different from the common mortal who’s stuck in samsara. The gate statement says that unhindered speech causes living beings to rejoice, and that’s an interesting word. Originally it meant to bring joy to others rather than to feel joy and delight ourselves. Now we know what we mean by rejoicing and we know what we mean by unrestricted speech. We move through the world, carrying out our activities while recognizing whatever we encounter for what it truly is, calling it by an apprioriate name for those circumstances without getting stuck in the labeling or in any particular worldview. We can talk to anyone in any situation and explain things clearly without the hindrance of our own biases and agendas and ignorance. On that basis we can help others take skillful action and lessen their suffering. When the three poisons quiet down, we can all recognize the joy that’s already there, which has nothing to do with how much cherry pie we have. It has to do with seeing that we can enjoy the cherry pie and we can also live without it. Interestingly, in order to experience joy, we need to liberate ourselves from our ideas about joy. If I think happiness is tied only to feeding these five skandhas, then my whole life becomes samsara and chasing after things and avoiding things, and if I’m caught up in that stuff, there’s no way I can help anyone else. This is an interesting gate to consider in light of a recent piece of research from the Pew Research Center. Two-thirds of women (66%) say that in the past year, they have personally thought “a lot” or “some” about big questions, including whether there is any purpose to suffering, and why terrible things happen to people, and 55% of men report the same. When seeing or hearing about terrible things happening to people, 71% of women and 53% of men say they often feel sad for those who are suffering. Forty six percent of women and 34% of men report often feeling the desire to help those who are suffering. Nearly everyone reported feeling these things sometimes; the important word here is often. Seventy one percept of women and 53% of men often feel sad but 46% of women and 34% of men often want to help. It seems there’s lot more “I feel sad for others” than “I want to help others.” Interestingly, about a third of people say they often or sometimes feel happy “if the person suffering seems to have deserved it” (37% / 31%), and about 10% of people often feel this way. That’s not sympathetic joy, it’s just the opposite -- pleasure in someone else’s suffering. This is the human condition; we’re hardwired to compete and survive. It’s the condition of the “common mortal” in the sutra but it’s not the condition of the bodhisatva, and we might ask ourselves why, even when we empathize with the suffering of others, we don’t always feel the desire to help. Sometimes we’re feeling overwhelmed, either by compassion fatigue if we’re working directly with people, or by its cousin, news fatigue, which affects between two thirds and four-fifths of people at least sometimes. Frequently, we just don’t know what to do to be helpful, and this is a topic that comes up over and over again in our sangha conversations. When faced with a world on fire, what can I possibly do that would make any difference? Then we become paralyzed. We can’t do anything because we can’t do everything. How about simply speaking to everyone we encounter as a bodhisattva would speak? Speech is a front-line activity in connecting with other people and a hugely important practice opportunity in the Soto Zen tradition. We can pay attention to our habits of speech such that at least we’re not causing suffering, and maybe we can be catalysts for a bit of joy. Yet again, it’s not simply a matter of being polite; that’s not the kind of habit we’re talking about here. It’s deeper than that. It’s habits of thought that lead to habits of speech. We need to practice as bodhisattvas and cultivate wisdom to see things as they really are, and then our speech is naturally compassionate and promotes joy. It can be as simple as actually paying attention to people, asking them questions about themselves rather than just talking about ourselves, and actually being interested in the answers. We bring spirit of inquiry to our zazen practice when we get on cushion, and we can bring the same curiousity and inquiry to our conversations and into the rest of our lives. We all know how lovely it is to feel like someone cares about what we think and how our lives are going. That’s an important kind of joy. Is that going to stop the war in the Middle East or rebuild temples damaged in a Japanese earthquake? No, but it might cause that person not to say or do something that causes suffering in the next being he encounters, and that’s where it all starts. We'll end with a bit of the Avatamsaka Sutra that seems to pull together all of the last four gates that I mentioned in the beginning, so again we’re going to hear about conduct, speech and memory, or body, speech and mind. Unhindered is the Buddha’s knowledge that all is illusory; He clearly comprehends all things in all times, Delving into the mental patterns of all sentient beings: This is the realm of Skilful Teaching. The bounds of his total recall are not to be found; The ocean of his eloquence is also unlimited. He is able to turn the wheel of the pure, subtle, truth: This is the liberation of Great Light. The nature of actions is vast and inexhaustible― His knowledge comprehends it and skillfully explains; All his methods are inconceivable: Such is the entry of Wisdom. Turning the wheel of inconceivable truth, Demonstrating and practicing the way of enlightenment, Forever annihilating the suffering of all sentient beings. Questions for reflection and discussion:
Accomplishment of the state of dhāraṇī is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we hear the Dharma of all the buddhas and are able to receive and retain it. 成就陀羅尼是法明門、聞一切佛法能受持故。 Maybe like me, when you first see this statement you think it sounds familiar. It sounds an awful lot like the verse we chant to open the sutra. We’ll consider that, but first let’s look at the elements specific to this gate statement. (Note that dharani is the Sanskrit spelling, but darani is the way it's spelled in transliterated Japanese.) “Accomplishment of state of dharani” might seem like an unusual phrase. A dharani is an incantation or spell; the most familiar to us is likely the Daihi Shin Darani. (See it in our chant book here.) However, there are many more. In the training temple, for instance, we chant the Shosaimyo Kichijo Darani in front of kitchen altar every morning to prevent disaster. No mo san man da moto nan oha ra chi koto sha sono nan to ji to en gya gya gya ki gya ki un nun shifu ra shifu ra hara shifu ra hara shifu ra chishu sa chishu sa chishu ri chishu ri soha ja soha ja sen chi gya shiri ei so mo ko The Kanromon or Ambrosia Gate that is usually chanted for an evening service or hungry ghost ceremony is one long string of dharanis one after another. These aren’t normal language; it's transliterated Sanskrit, considered a magical language. This is how we usually think of dharani, but the gate statement says “accomplishing a state of dharani.”. What is that? There’s a chapter in a collection of Mahayana sutras called the Mahasamnipata that uses the term dhāraṇī-prati-labdha. It means one who has attained memory or attained dharani -- so this is dharani as memory rather than as simply a spell that we chant. The text says that a bodhisattva attains memory after doing 32 kinds of purifications, and then the rain of the dharma falls and puts out the fires of delusion and samsara and makes all the qualities of the Buddha grow. This is nirvana, extinguishing the flame of suffering, desire or delusion. The text says: He who has attained memory (dhāraṇī) knows the practice that is never forgetting any dharma of the Buddha. In this way, son of good family, the Bodhisattva who has attained memory practices not forgetting. A dharani as a verse may serve as a mnemonic, a way to remember the essence of various teachings as well as an incantation for protection, and by extension, attaining dharani or a state of dharani is being able to retain and uphold all of Buddha’s teaching so that nothing is lost. For our friends in the Pure Land tradition, attaining dharani is the 46th vow of Amida Buddha in the Infinite Life Sutra: When I attain Buddhahood, all the Bodhisattvas in other worlds, upon hearing my Name will realise the Dharma of Away from Birth and attain Dharani. In the sutra, Hōzō Bosatsu made 48 Great Vows promising to create a Pure Land and guaranteed rebirth in the Pure Land to anyone who would sincerely recite his name, particularly at the time of their death. When he fulfilled all these vows, he attained Buddhahood and became Amida Buddha. This 46th vow says that by hearing his name, bodhisattvas will realize the Dharma of Away from Birth and attain dharani, In the world of form, there is arising and perishing and birth and death, and in the world of emptiness there is no birth and death. In attaining dharani, the bodhisattva can carry both of these truths; conditioned things are impermanent, and also when everything is one piece and without any fixed self-nature, there is no coming and going, or birth and death. Some translations of this vow don’t use the phrase "attaining dharani." They say that bodhisattvas will spontaneously be able to hear and learn any dharma teaching they wish, which is almost a direct parallel with our gate statement: we hear the Dharma of all the buddhas and are able to receive and retain it. Also, the introduction to the Lotus Sutra describes the Buddha at a gathering of 12-thousand monks, two thousand students, six thousand followers of nuns, 60-thousand sons of gods, eight dragon kings. and various other special beings, and there were also 80-thousand bodhisattvas who “all had attained dharani and joyful, unobstructed eloquence and turned the irreversable dharma wheel.” I think its interesting that amongst all these incredibly special people and deities and dragons and whatnot, the bodhisattvas had attained dharani and were put in their own category. The implication is that it’s not enough to be a dragon king or a deity. It’s the bodhisattvas who are in a position to attain dharani and be able to hear and learn whatever dharma they wish. Attaining dharani, or being within awakening, we can remember and practice all of Buddha’s teachings. That’s not a matter of memorizing a long list of teachings and then going down the list and practicing each thing like a checklist. It’s a matter of seeing the entirety of the reality of this moment and on that basis understanding all the various teachings and how they fit together. By going through one door, we go through all doors. We can see broadly enough to know how to apply the dharma to each situation. Not only that, we can expound the teachings clearly to others. That’s turning the dharma wheel, and the irreversible nature of that is important. Attaining dharani is sometimes coupled with "non-retreating wisdom" -- we don’t forget what Buddha taught, and we have the energy and conviction to share the dharma in the world so it doesn’t get lost. The sutra says we do that with joyful eloquence, or unobstructed eloquence of joyful speech, which is one of the four kinds of unobstructed eloquence. This one in particular is about being able to talk about the dharma in ways that people can understand and in ways that make them happy. Attaining a state of dharani means we have the wisdom to understand and remember Buddha’s teachings and the compassion to share them skillfully with others. This is "retaining and upholding," and we can see why it makes sense that we use dharani as the label for some of our verses. It literally means “that by which something is sustained.” However, as a mnemonic for remembering teachings, dharani don’t make sense because they were transliterated from Sanskrit to Chinese and then to Japanese for their sound rather than their meaning. The sound itself was said to contain the magical properties, so you can’t really translate them into English for meaning, and we usually don’t know what text they’re supposed to be summarizing anyway. Now, there is also the teaching that everything is the Buddha’s dharmakaya, or dharma body, and that all sentient and insentient beings are preaching dharma all time. In that way it doesn’t matter whether we understand what we’re chanting or believe in it as a power to avert disaster. The act of completely carrying out our function as jijuyu zammai is the retaining and upholding of the dharmakaya. Attaining a state of dharani is not going into a trance while chanting something repetitive and rhythmic., The point of this gate statement is not to hypnotize ourselves or others! Entering into awakening, we completely see the true reality of all beings and understand all of Buddha’s teachings about that, we practice our understanding ourselves, we share the dharma with others in ways that they can grasp, and help them become liberated from suffering and find some peace and contentment. Let’s put the gate statement next to the Opening the Sutra verse: The unsurpassed, profound and wondrous dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it. May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s words. This seems to have many of the same elements. There’s seeing and hearing, and accepting and maintaining (or receiving and retaining). There’s unfolding the dharma, sharing the dharma with others. However, this verse is not a dharani but a gatha. A gatha is a poem for chanting or singing, not just written down to read to oneself. The form is a bit of Zoroastrian influence on our practice that we picked up along the Silk Road. There’s a gatha for just about everything we do in a day in the temple: waking up, washing the face, brushing the teeth, shaving the head, using the toilet, eating meals. They help us remember that every action, including the mundane day to day stuff we do to carry out daily living, is practice. Why is it important to recognize opening a sutra? "Opening" can mean two things: 1) It’s a literal unrolling of a scroll or opening of a book in which a sutra is written. Sutras are relics of Buddha and we handle them with care. We don't put them directly on the floor, or stack things on top of them. It’s important to pay attention when we’re getting ready to study. 2) It’s revealing, introducing, or making the sutra available by reading it out loud or talking about it and explaining it. This is how the dharma is heard and received, so we encounter phrases like "unfolding the Tathagata’s words." The Opening of the Sutra verse is Kaikyouge in Japanese. It's not specific to Zen; we find it also in Tendai and other traditions. There are four lines of seven kanji which are quite regular, unlike the English version. 無上甚深微妙法 / 百千万劫難遭遇 / 我今見聞得受持 / 願解如来真実義 Mujō jinjin mimyōhō / hyakusenmangō nansōgu gakon kenmon toku juji / gangenyōrai shinjitsugi This verse is at least as old as the 500s AD. It shows up in liturgical texts from that time in China and it has some connection to the Lotus Sutra as well. The unsurpassed, profound and wondrous dharma Todo-san has pointed out that this phrase is pointing in two directions. Unsurpassed means highest and broadest and indicates movement upward. Profound and wondrous means subtle and deep and indicates movement downwards. This dharma is both expansive and absolute, and detailed and concrete, and this is both the dharma that means the way the uniiverse functions in reality and the dharma that means what Buddha awakened to and taught. When we see "the dharma of all the Buddhas" in the gate statement, we hear the whole entire story, all senient and insentient beings preaching the dharma, or completely manifesting the truth of this moment, both in the largest possible sense of being within the network of interdependent origination -- that’s the prajna or wisdom element -- and in the sense that we’re encountering actual living beings that are suffering and need our help -- that’s the compassion element. Something unsurpassed, profound and wondrous is not something we can understand intellectually. It’s not something we can measure or compare based on our limited human thoughts and concepts, so we have to give up preconceptions about what we’re about to receive. Accomplishment of the state of dharani, or remembering what Buddha taught, is the same as seeing both dimensions of the dharma: the highest and the deepest, the wisdom and the compassion, and the dharma of all the Buddhas. The verse goes on: is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. On the one hand, the chance to study the dharma is pretty uncommon. To encounter people carrying out practice that’s been authentically transmitted down through the lineage, or a teacher who really understands the dharma and can explain it in ways that encourage us to practice, is pretty rare anyway, let alone in 21st century North America, where Soto Zen is not a mainstream tradition. Yet the previous lines just said that the dharma is everywhere, from the highest and broadest to the subtlest and deepest. It brings me back to Dogen’s original question -- if awakening is already here, why do we have to practice? Well, how often do we actually meet with the dharma? The dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas. We’re swimming in dharma, immersed in dharma every moment of every day because we can’t not be, but we can go our whole lives and not really see it or connect ourselves with it. For that, we have to practice and do zazen, work, study and ritual. Then we meet the dharma: Oh! Something is here! I never realized. I was too caught up in my mental fabrications and self involvement to notice. Now we can see and hear it, accept and maintain it. The gate statement says we’re able to receive and retain it. Seeing and hearing some teachings about dharma, we’re ready take those in. Now, that too requires some intention; it’s not just a matter of downloading stuff and filing it away along with all of our other information. We have to be ready to engage with it. There are so many places in our practice where we encounter this pattern. One of the reasons that precepts are important as one of the threefold learnings of the eightfold path is that they help us settle. By not perpetuating suffering for ourselves and others, we can calm down and let go of distraction and fully engage in practice. Zazen of course is important in a similar way. We also see this pattern of preparing to receive teachings in ceremonies for receiving precepts, both lay and ordained, and ryaku fusatsu. The order of service is not random at all; the arc of that story is really important. We can’t just string together our favorite texts in any order we want and call that Soto Zen liturgy. In the ryaku fusatsu, for instance, we start with repentance, then bodhisattva vows. We’ve cleaned the slate and now we’re renewing our aspiration. Then we invoke buddhas and bodhisattvas as witnesses, we do a ritual purification of the space with wisdom water, and now we’re ready to hear the Kyojukaimon. Now we can see and hear it, and now we can receive and accept teachings without hindrances and distractions, but there’s also this element in both the verse and the statement about maintaining or retaining. In both cases, the root is to hold onto something. Retain means to hold something back. Maintain comes from manu tenere, to hold onto something with the hand, and eventually it came to mean to practice something habitually. When I see "maintain" in this verse, I’m immediately pointed back to the three kinds of three treasures: abiding, manifesting and maintaining. How do we see, hear, accept and maintain the dharma? We’ve heard this many times. but quick review: The absolute three treasures are Buddha as unsurpassable True Awakening (Annutara-samyak-sambodhi), dharma as the Reality that is pure and free from defilements, and sangha as the virtue of peace and harmony. The manifesting three treasures are Buddha as Gautama, later Shakyamuni, who appeared in the world as a teacher, the dharma as the content of his awakening and what he taught and transmitted to others, and the sangha as the people who gathered around Shakyamuni to form the first practice community. The maintaining three treasures are the Buddha figures and images that we encounter today, and I would argue also anyone who embodies awakening, the dharma as teachings that we encounter in sutras, books, videos, websites, etc. and the sangha as us right here, modern day practice communities still carrying on zazen, work, study and ritual. Thus we have the absolute three treasures that we can’t grasp with the intellect, the manifesting three treasures that we’ve decided to accept as historically appearing in the world, and the maintaining three treasures are what we actually encounter ourselves today right here. Retaining and maintaining dharma is remembering our commitment to practice and embody awakening right here and now, moment after moment. We retain in our memory what the Buddhas and ancestors and our teachers have taught us and how they practiced, and we aspire to keep that alive in a concrete way. Buddha remains alive today only when we embody his practice, when we manifest prajna, sila and samadhi, or wisdom, ethics and concentration. Our Opening the Sutra verse means something like this. It’s rare to encounter and really understand and enter into the dharma. Now I’m about to receive some teachings, and I’m ready to see and hear them and take them in at all levels, then integrate them and let them completely sink in so I remember how to live as a bodhisattva all the time and so I can see both form and emptiness and then turn that understanding around to liberate beings. We’re clearly not saying, Thanks for the swell teachings that I’m going to gobble up on my own so I feel better and become successful. Just as we generate merit by chanting and then turn that around to dedicate to others, we absorb dharma teachings so we can turn them around and offer them in the world. When you receive dharma transmission as a teacher, your job is then to make sure you hand that tranmission to someone else before you die so that the lineage goes on and the three treasures remain in the world. You don’t take that on for yourself. The buck can’t stop with you. You’re just a conduit for the ongoing maintaining three treasures. May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s words. Unfold can mean we’re physically opening a book or unrolling a scroll containing dharma teachings, but it can also mean that we’re going to unpack and realize the dharma, and these can be two different things. We can unpack the meaning of some teachings that are hard to understand because they’re dense or the words are difficult. This is what Okumura Roshi does when he explains Dogen’s writings to us. We can investigate the teachings so that we understand them ourselves for our own growth or benefit, but that’s not enough and we can’t stop there. We have to realize these teachings, make them real in the world with our own bodies and minds. That’s how we unfold them. We sort of put them into motion so they affect others all along the network. May we unfold the meaning of the Tathagata’s words is sometimes translated as the Tathagata’s truth. Buddha spent his teaching life sharing with others the truth that he saw when he had his awakening experience under the bodhi tree. His words and teachings are an expression of the true reality of all beings. Not only are we investigating words and teachings for understanding, we’re actively participating in the truth of awakening. What’s the meaning of the words, and what’s the meaning of the truth expressed by the words? It might sound like we take in all this dharma and receive it and keep it for ourselves, sort of like curating a collection, but remembering what Buddha taught and remembering to practice by their nature are not only about our own situation. To receive and retain the dharma means moving through the world as a bodhisattva, with an outward as well as an inward focus. I’m reminded of the number of times in the Shobogenzo Zuimonki in which Dogen Zenji refers to our being vessels of the dharma. Dharma gets poured in and we accept and receive it and take care of it. Just like water takes the shape of the container it’s in, the dharma manifests in each of us according to our karmic conditions. He says over and over, Never think that you’re not a vessel of the dharma, that you’re not receiving and carrying and embodying dharma. To remember to practice is to retain the dharma as this kind of vessel, to be a source of skillful action in the world that relies or is based on bodhicitta. Questions for reflection and discussion:
Entry into all conduct is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we attain realization of the Buddha-eye. 入一切行是法明門、得佛眼成就故。 This is very similar to Gate 101, Entry into the state of unrestricted speech is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we attain realization of the Dharma-eye. Most of the kanji in these two statements are the same and the structure is the same, so probably they’re related or showing us two sides of something. Let’s look at what conduct means here and then review what the buddha eye is and how these two things are connected. The kanji in the statement that’s being translated “conduct” is gyo 行. Gyo is a really important word in our tradition and there are various ways to translate it. One is conduct, but it can also mean practice, action or activity. Let’s start with conduct, because that seems fairly specific. Conduct usually means behavior or deportment. We think of good conduct as meaning having good manners, following the rules, and behaving ethically. Actually, this English word “conduct” is really interesting, because it can also be read conDUCT, as a verb rather than a noun. The original Latin word meant “brought together,” and as it made its way into English it meant safe passage, to conduct someone safely from one place to another, not unlike bodhisattvas conducting people safely to the other shore. ConDUCT has a sense of guiding, leading or managing. CONduct, or how we manage ourselves and our behavior, in the context of day to day practice can be concerned with forms and also with ethics or sila. These are how we actualize our understanding in concrete ways with this karmic human body. Considering our conduct is a great practice of letting go of self clinging. Getting along in a sangha requires us to consider the needs of others. We can’t just do whatever we want because we understand interconnectedness, and with that wisdom, compassion arises naturally. Practice forms reflect wisdom and compassion the way manners reflect etiquette. Etiquette has to to do with the underlying principles for how we get along in society, things like consideration, respect and honesty, along with graciousness and basic kindness. Those things don’t change over time. However, manners can be situational. What we do at a state dinner at Buckingham Palace is not what we do when we eat with friends at home, and what was appropriate a hundred years ago isn’t necessarily appropriate today, but basic principles of getting along underlie manners in both contexts. Dogen tells us that if we want to practice the Way, we should practice the conduct of the ancestors. Doing exactly what they were doing in that culture and time might not be a good fit here and now, but the attitude and the understanding is the same; in our zazen, in particular, we enter into the same space with them. Thus our actions -- our conduct -- are rooted in a larger understanding. It makes sense that precepts and ethics are a part of this thing. This is the sila section of eightfold path: right speech, action and livelihood. At Gate 101 we talked about unrestricted speech, so we can start to see how these two statements are connected. Gyo as action covers everything we do with body, speech and mind, the three things we use to create karma, whether we’re in the temple or not, and whether someone’s watching or not. This is about how we move through the world as bodhisattvas. Dogen Zenji says in Shobogenzo Zuimonki: Without having the slightest expectation, maintain the prescribed manner of conduct. Okumura Roshi has said that for people living in the training temple, the prescribed manner of conduct is following the schedule and wholeheartedly taking on all the activities of the day in the temple. Yet for laypeople and those of us who don’t live in the temple, it means taking care of our jobs and families, living in the community and paying attention to our lives in the world, and doing that in a sustainable and ethical way. In the training temple, the person who supervises novices’ conduct is the ino. Outside of the temple, we have to supervise our conduct as bodhisattvas for ourselves. Dogen Zenji goes on: Think of acting to save and benefit living-beings, earnestly carry out all good deeds, and give up former evil ones, solely for the sake of becoming the foundation of happiness for human and heavenly beings. Without stagnating in good deeds of the present, continue practicing your whole lifetime. Gyo can also be translated as performance, but we have to be really careful about that. This is performing as in simply carrying something out, not performing as in putting on an act or a show. There is certainly a tradition of very carefully constructing and “performing” or carrying out rituals in Japanese Buddhism, particularly the more esoteric schools. Where you do it is important, as is how it’s done and what imagery is present. All of these things are designed to affect the participants’ experience of what they see and hear. Ceremonies may be elaborate, but they’re not for entertainment or to impress people. In fact, this is one of the guidelines of practice at Sanshin: Keeping forms and ceremonies simple in order to understand what we’re doing and why, and to maintain their connection with zazen. Rather than just being performances, forms should come from the mind of shikantaza as an expression of our understanding. Our practice here includes a relatively small number of the forms and formalities you might see in other Soto Zen places. That’s not because the forms aren’t important. We do a few forms and do them simply so that we can understand why we’re doing what we’re doing and keep the connection between forms and the mind of shikantaza. Our outward forms come from inside. Whatever forms we choose to do, we try to do them thoroughly and without separation into an “I” that’s “performing” a “ritual.” We let go of extras like using our conduct to build our egos or compare ourselves to others. We just fold ourselves seamlessly into the activity of the community. When we do, those forms are alive as the complete functioning of practice-realization. Gyo also shows up in rigyo (利行), helpful conduct or beneficial action. In the largest sense, this means doing good for others with body, speech and mind, and in that way connecting them with the dharma. As bodhisattvas, this is how we liberate beings. We’ve seen gyo as conduct, but it can also mean practice, whatever we’re doing as a realization of awakening or manifestation of our buddha nature. There’s an important nuance here: it’s not whatever we’re doing TO realize awakening but AS a realization of awakening. As Dogen Zenji says, practice and realization arise together. In fact, Dogen Zenji wrote three fascicles of the Shobogenzo related to gyo:
Gyoji, or continuous practice: is often represented as a circle. There are two ways we can think about what continuous practice is. One is the need to practice moment by moment based on vow and repentence. We vow to save beings, but we’re never going to get to the end of that vow, so in next minute we recognize that practice will never be complete. Again and again we do vow and repentance; we can’t just do it once. Again and again we engage in zazen, work, study and ritual; we can’t just do it once. Even after we have some awakening experience or a bit of insight, now we have to practice with integrating that into our bodhisattva activity. The other way we need to understand gyoji is as another way to say that practice and realization arise together. In his Gyoji fascicle Dogen Zenji wrote: In the great Way of the buddhas and ancestors, there is always unsurpassable continuous practice which is the Way like a circle without interruption. Between the arousing of awakening-mind, practice, awakening, and Nirvana, there is not the slightest break. Continuous practice is the circle of the Way. In all of our activities on and off the cushion or in and out of the zendo, practice and realization are both there. Then there’s dai shugyo or great practice, practice that transcends all distinctions and separations. There’s good and bad and going beyond good and bad. There’s being affected by cause and effect and not being affected by cause and effect and going beyond being affected or not. There’s thinking and not thinking and going beyond thinking and not thinking. Going beyond distinction in our practice means not negating one side or the other and making then cancel each other out. We see form as form and emptiness as emptiness and we also see that they’re two sides of one reality. Finally there’s gyobutsu igi, the dignified conduct of practice buddhas. Dignified doesn’t mean snooty or stuffy. The root of the word means worthy, and the sense is usually worthy of respect. We look to buddhas as models of awakening and of how we should behave as bodhisattvas. We’re going to come back to practice-buddhas in a moment; first we have to consider that the subject of our gate statement is “entry into all conduct.” Does that mean we’re supposed to carry out every possible form? Enter into every single practice activity that’s offered? That seems impossible. At Gate 101 we saw that “entry into” in this case means dropping off body and mind and completely manifesting unrestricted speech, or for Gate 102, all conduct -- in all our actions, dropping off body and mind and fully realizing awakening. In all of our actions, we see that there is no gap between practice and realization and transcend all distinctions without disregarding forms. Entering into all conduct is remembering moment by moment that we’re bodhisattvas moving in a network of interdependence, over and over again opening the hand of thought and letting go of clinging to our five skandhas, paying attention to all of our actions of body, speech and mind, and knowing that there’s not one of them that isn’t setting up causes and conditions for the next thing to unfold. That next thing might be something that directly affects others, or it might just be that we’re establishing wholesome or unwholesome habits for ourselves. Over the years, when I’ve wanted to take shortcuts in practice and told myself “Oh well, no one’s around, so I’ll just do half the job today.” the remedy has been for me to remind myself to let go of clinging to my opinion and fully practice in this moment. Then my resistance to doing whatever it is calms down. Here’s the dynamic I’ve seen in myself over time, and maybe it happens for you as well. I notice that my activity is being driven by the need to support the practice of others. If there aren’t any others here, then continuing to carry out that activity feels like a lost opportunity to do something else. No one has come for zazen, so rather than sitting alone in the zendo I could be taking care of other things that I never have time to do. This is classic suffering, wanting things to be other than they are. At any other time, if people were here, I wouldn’t think twice about putting in the time to carry out practice activities, so clearly I have an opportunity to do some discernment about non-reliance. What’s driving my practice, my own bodhicitta or my job description? Let’s briefly review the last part of the gate statement, the buddha eye. We've already considered the five eyes from the Diamond Sutra. With the Buddha eye, we see the complete truth of all phenomena in the past, present and future, and this eye includes the functions of all the others. This is where all duality gets collapsed and there’s no divide between subject and object. There’s no buddha seeing something, there’s just seeing. The buddha eye doesn’t separate space into distinct places or time into separate days or hours. There’s just unsurpassable true awakening, where here and now is not separate from all space and time. Maybe you’ve seen eyes of Buddha painted on stupas, particularly in Vajrayana-influenced areas of the world. They can be painted on each of four sides to show that the buddha eye sees in all directions throughout space and time. The buddha eye sees the true reality of all beings. Some years ago Okumura Roshi explained what Dogen Zenji meant when he said in the Tenzo Kyokun: Do not see with your common eyes and do not think with your common sentiment. He explained the difference between bongen or the common eye and butsugen or the buddha eye. Bon is a word used for actions, qualities or people who are not buddha. Using the common eye results in chasing after, escaping from and competing with others. It’s the cause of transmigration through samsara. Bon and butsu are opposites. Butsugen or the buddha eye is one with jijuyu zammai, in which everything we encounter is our life, as Uchiyama Roshi says. Okumura Roshi made the point that when we’re working in the kitchen as tenzos we don’t think of that as something that requires the buddha eye. We’re just concerned about the tasks of getting cereal cooked and fruit chopped and water boiled, but actually, the kitchen is just as much a place of practice as the zendo. I think gyobutsu igi, the dignified conduct of practice buddhas, is the intersection of the two halves of the gate statement: conduct or practice, and the buddha eye. In order to really enter into practice as continuous realization, we have to see reality completely, without separation, or to say it the other way, when we see with the buddha eye, when we see the true reality of all things in the past, present and future, the dignified conduct of practice-buddhas is what arises. That means we don’t disregard what comes in through the senses. We accept that this human condition comes with delusions and we vow to see through them without judgement. We see one reality from two sides and express two sides in one action, and we use our understanding to liberate beings because we aren’t separate from them or from the total functioning of the universe, or this one unified reality. Okumura Roshi has written: In Gyo-butsu-iigi, `iigi means `form’ and `gyo’ stands for `practise’. So, `gyo-butsu-iigi’ means `practise Buddha’s decorum’ or `Buddha’s form’. `Gyo-butsu-iigi’ is the name of one of the chapters of the Shobogenzo. In that chapter, he uses the word `gyo-butsu’ as a name for Buddha. Our practice is a Buddha named `Gyo-butsu’. Not this person, but this person’s practice is a buddha. We’d usually think that a Buddha has to be a person, an awakened one, but as soon as we see it that way, there’s a person and the actions of that person and something called awakening. A practice-buddha is simply awakening without any fabrications about what awakening and buddhas and practice are. Dogen Zenji says in Gyobutsu-igi: All buddhas without exception fully practice dignified conduct. This practice is Practice Buddha. Sharing one corner of the Buddha’s dignified conduct is done together with the entire universe, the great earth, and with the entire coming-and-going of life-and-death. This is nothing other than the dignified conduct of the oneness of Practice and Buddha. Awakening may take some form that we can call decorum or conduct, but all conduct and buddha and the buddha eye and awakening and realization are all not separate from the beginning. When we see clearly, practice happens. When we practice, we make awakening concrete in the world. In other words, when we practice, buddha appears. This is a key theme of Dogen’s teaching: awakening doesn’t have meaning unless and until we engage in practice. In Gyobutsu-igi he says: Active buddhas alone fully experience the vital process on the path of going beyond buddha . . . . They bring forth dignified conduct with their bodies. Thus, their transformative function flows out in their speech, reaching throughout time, space, buddhas and activities. Active buddhas see with the buddha eye and go beyond buddha. They completely manifest awakening without having any idea about being buddha and manifesting awakening, and Dogen says this is vital process, something that’s alive and dynamic. This dignified buddha conduct is a practice, something we do moment by moment. Dogen goes on to say that even though it’s people who are engaging in this conduct, our limited karmic human form can’t defile it. Okumura Roshi says: The Lotus Sutra says only a Buddha together with a Buddha can fathom the true reality of all beings. Only a Buddha together with a Buddha means no human beings. So the subject of this practice is not this independent person, but all beings. This entire network practices through this single person’s body and mind. So this sitting is not my personal action, even though I use my personal body and mind. That separation falls down. The buddha eye sees karmic human form for what it is, so there’s no delusion or hindrance. This body and mind is perfectly fine as a vessel of the dharma, and our actions are complete manifestations of the dynamic functioning of the universe. Defilement doesn’t happen until we start poking our heads in and having ideas about what should be happening and whether we like it or not. I’m going to let Uchiyama Roshi have the last word. Just sit in the Reality of Life seeing hell and paradise, misery and joy, life and death, all with the same eye. No matter what the situation, we live the life of the Self. We must sit immovably on that foundation. This is essential; this is what “becoming one with the universe” means. If we divide this universe into two, striving to attain satori and to escape delusion, we are not the whole universe. Happiness and unhappiness, satori and delusion, life and death; see them with the same eye. In every situation the Self lives the life of the Self — such a self must do itself by itself. This universal Life is the place to which we return. Questions for reflection and discussion:
Entry into the state of unrestricted speech is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we attain realization of the Dharma-eye. 入無礙辯是法明門、得法眼成就故。 First let’s look at what unrestricted speech means in this gate statement. Then we need to understand “entry,” because there are some nuances there. Next we’ll talk about the dharma eye -- what that is and why it’s important -- and finally we’ll intersect everything and see how it all connects. Unrestricted speech sounds like just saying whatever we want at tops of our voices! Is this about being completely free to express ourselves in whatever way we want? What kind of restrictions are we talking about? The kanji here means hindrance, obstruction or disturbance, so this isn’t about restricting what we say in order to follow precepts or some other guideline. It’s not about censoring ourselves or controlling ourselves in that way. The gate is pointing to being hindered by attachment to mistaken assumptions about the nature of reality, or our view being limited by our delusion and inabiliy to see the whole landscape of this moment. We’re having a hard time carrying out Right Speech because of our ignorance., Whatever skill we may have in speaking or communicating, and whatever ability we may have to use our intellects, is being twisted because we’ve followed our misunderstandings about the universe right off the rails. Unrestricted speech comes from the point of view of unobstructed wisdom or prajna. It’s how we speak and teach when we act from a place of seeing clearly and deeply understanding impermanence, interdependence and the emptiness of the five skandhas. This points us back to the way body, speech and mind are connected when it comes to karmic action. First some thought arises in the mind, and of course, there’s a whole process about how that happens called the 12-fold chain of dependent origination. (For more on that, see our Buddhist Essentials page.) On the basis of that thought in the mind, we say something. If the thought was wholesome, there’s at least some chance that what we say will be, too. If not, we have a pretty good chance of saying something that breaks a precept or causes some kind of suffering. When we think stuff and say stuff, we’re likely to take some action with the body that’s related to what we think and say, so clearly we need to pay attention to thinking and speaking before they lead to a big mistake. That means that we can’t just monitor what we say or what we teach in isolation from the rest of our functioning and expect that everything will be OK. Nothing arises without a cause, and suffering has roots that we can trace and understand, so we can’t engage in unrestricted speech without engaging in zazen, work, study and liturgy: in other words, practice in its entirety. Entry into something sounds like there’s something we need to get or somewhere we need to go, and we have to be careful about getting caught up in the idea that there’s a fixed state that we need to reach in order for something to happen. “Entering into” in this context is to drop off body and mind, to realize that there’s already no separation so there’s already no restriction or hindrance. What’s keeping us from “entering into” is our five skandhas clinging to five skandhas. If we can let go of the clinging, we easily “enter into.” All this reminds me of the step in the hero’s journey called crossing the threshold. The hero’s journey is a standard set of 17 plot points that make up the structure of most screenplays, novels or epic stories. The fifth one is crossing the threshold, where the protagonist has finally accepted a challenge and stepped out of the ordinary world and into unknown territory in order to solve the problem. In most cases there’s a threshold guardian, some kind of natural barrier or dangerous being, something that prevents the hero from just deciding to cross and then doing it. In other words, there’s something scary about taking that step. When it comes to our practice, we may think we really want to drop off body and mind and enter into this space of non-separation, but we also really want to hang onto an idea about who we are. It can feel like annihilation to let go of clinging to these five skandhas. Who am I if I let go of my self-concepts? Do I disappear? Do I lose my identity? Do I become somebody else? Is it like amnesia? Will I die? How do I act or know what to do if I don’t know who I am? If I cross over and enter into this space of unrestricted speech, how do I know what to say? We can be afraid of being sort of unmoored or disoriented. Stopping our clinging to five skandhas can put us into a space we’re not used to being in, so we think it’s just a big cloud of confusion and unknown and the unfamiliar. Actually, entering into in the context of this gate statement is understanding or realizing -- making real, making concrete -- our wisdom and compassion, so it’s not floating around in a fog. We’re really stepping out of the fog of delusion and habituated thinking and into a space of clarity and reality. The kind of speech that arises from this unhindered and unrestricted place has several names within our tradition. We’ve talked about them before, but here's a quick review. Back at Gate 6 saw that paying attention to the actions of the mouth headed off a group of evils: lying, spreading rumors, slander, engaging in idle talk, and speaking in a way that causes problems between others. This is the tradtional definition of right speech on the eightfold path. At Gate 77 we talked about right speech and saw that on an everyday level, right speech doesn’t create suffering for ourselves or others. At the absolute level, it’s letting go of words and concepts altogether. Keeping this balance is how we keep the fourth precept about not speaking falsehood, seeing one reality from two sides and expressing two sides in one action. We need to say things in order to function in the world as bodhisattvas; at same time, we know that words are limited and can’t express entirety of this moment. Some of us in the sangha spent a long time recently talking about the Shobogenzo Bodaisatta Shishobo, or Four Embracing Actions of the Bodhisattva, one of which is loving speech, and we’ll return to that in a minute. The gate statement is saying that when our speech is not hindered by delusion and clinging and ignorance, that is itself a realization (making-real or manifestation) of the dharma eye. (See Gate 100 for a review of the five eyes from the Diamond Sutra.) When we use unrestricted speech we tap into the dharma eye, so that means our speech is a real concrete instance of carrying out our vow to liberate beings -- but how does that happen? In the Shishobo, Dogen Zenji says: Loving-speech means, first of all, to arouse compassionate mind when meeting with living beings, and to offer caring and loving words. In general, we should not use any violent or harmful words. . . . To speak with a mind that “compassionately cares for living beings as if they were our own babies” is loving-speech. It seems important that Dogen Zenji is saying we should speak with a mind that sees all beings as though they were our children. This is a practice that starts before we open our mouths. It starts with paying attention to our thoughts and perceptions. Regardless of what we’re actually saying, what’s our attitude when we talk to people? Can we really see the reality of interconnectedness and nonseparation and emptiness in that moment of that encounter? Do we really feel the need to take care of that conversation as though we were taking care of our own children? It’s easy to fall into social convention of asking how someone is, but do we really care? Sometimes simply showing some interest in someone’s wellbeing makes a big difference. I once read a Facebook post from someone whose partner was undergoing cancer treatment. This person was dismayed that no one had reached out to her as someone who was also affected by the situation, and she said, just responding to a Facebook post doesn’t count! She needed to actually talk to friends over coffee and to think about something besides managing the illness. The easy, convenient thing is just to click on a heart emoji or a sad face and feel good because we’ve provided some acknowledgement and support, but that wasn’t a real case of loving speech because this person needed something else and no one asked what that might be. This wasn’t someone I know well enough to get involved in that family’s situation, but it did make me realize that I needed to reach out to people I knew who were having health issues, and when I did, they were really appreciative. It was a kick on the backside from the universe that I need to pay more attention. This all means that we need to establish our practice and put in time on the cushion so we’re ready to meet the world and respond as skillful bodhisattvas with body, speech and mind, because if we’re not seeing all beings with the dharma eye, we can’t engage in unrestricted or loving speech. When people hear loving-speech directly their faces brighten and their minds become joyful. When people hear of a someone else’s loving-speech, they inscribe it in their hearts and souls. The power of unrestricted or loving speech to liberate beings goes beyond the one person you might be talking to at the moment. If others happen to hear that loving speech, they benefit too, and if they talk about it to their friends, the merit goes even farther. We never know where our words will end up across space and time. A skillful comment might not take root until some time later, and then, OH! that’s what that was about! OH! now I know what to do with that! We only have to think about how many times stories about dharma teachers are repeated. They were just responding to informal questions or making some comments, and yet years later those are turning words for somebody. Finally, Dogen Zenji says: We should know that loving-speech arises from a loving mind, and that the seed of a loving mind is compassionate heart. We should study how loving-speech has power to transform the world. It is not merely praising someone’s ability. We can say nice things, and maybe hold ourselves back from saying something we’ll regret later, but are we actually encountering all things as our children, with the clear wisdom and compassion of prajna, or are we putting on an act because we think we’re “supposed to?” Keeping ourselves from making mistakes is a good thing, but is it enough? We can’t stop there; we actually have to shift from relying on deluded thinking to relying on the dharma eye, and this is something we can cultivate. Dogen Zenji says that once we start paying attention to using loving speech, it becomes our usual way of being in the world. He says we won’t even notice what’s happening, but if we practice, gradually our speech will become kinder and less self-involved over time. Finally, he reminds us that this kind of speech is really, really important because it’s essential to resolving conflict with others and, we could also say, essential to the health of the network. Conflict is some indication of three poisonous minds. Someone somewhere is caught up in greed, anger or ignorance, and probably all three, and that’s the basis of suffering. Thus in this samsaric world on fire, if we can’t do anything else to ratchet down unwholesome stuff that’s happening, we can at least engage in unrestricted speech. That might not feel like much, but as we’ve seen, in order to engage in unrestricted speech we have to use the dharma eye, so there’s something powerful in back of this action. It’s not just nice words. We’re bringing our wisdom and compassion to that situation. So far I’ve been talking about speech in a general way, but the underlying sense of the Sanskrit here is teaching, discussing, discoursing. That’s speech being used in a particular way, being eloquent and using our rhetorical and intellectual skill, in this case to share the dharma. The kanji points to the Sanskrit word nirdesha: instruction, explanation or advice. For example, the Vimalakirti Sutra is sometimes called the Vimalakirti Nirdesa. In early texts, when Buddha or a bodhisattva is explaining something, it’s called nirdesha. This gate statement says that if we’re going to teach the dharma, or discuss the Buddha’s teachings, as bodhisattvas using the dharma eye, that teaching or discussion is going to come from a place of unrestrictedness. You may know that this sort of dharma talk is not the only way in which Zen teachers present the dharma. There is something called a teisho, literally presentation of the shout. It's not a sermon or an academic lecture, and not about concepts or factual knowledge. It’s a presentation of insight. Traditionally these things happen during sesshin and they deal with a koan or sometimes something from a sutra. Teisho has been described as insight returning to the source. It’s a demonstration of direct experiential understanding behind the words and content. The point is not to “teach” the koan but to show insight underneath the understanding of it. You may not be familiar with this sort of talk because we don’t do that sort of sesshin teisho here. There’s no talking during sesshin at all, and our practice is to let go of all thinking, including thinking about the dharma. Anyway, teisho as a direct presentation of the dharma doesn’t always make sense on the surface, particularly if the topic is a koan. When listening to teisho, you don’t need to try to understand every word with your intellect. Folks say they consider it another form of zazen, just sitting quietly and letting it wash over them and soak in, which makes me think that not only the speaker but also the listeners need to be unrestricted, listening without hindrance, being hijacked or jumping to conclusions about what’s being said. or deciding we like it or don’t like it or agree or disagree. This is listening without greed, anger and ignorance or any other kind of obstruction. Not only is the teacher directly presenting awakening or realization, the listener is directly receiving and participating in that awakening or realization. Neither side is becoming attached to the words or to any kind of distraction. They’re both just entering into the reality of this moment, in other words, unrestricted speech and unrestricted listening. Because the teisho is supposed to be spontaneous and expressing something in THIS moment, there are probably no notes, and it might not be delivered in a structured way with full sentences and carefully constructed paragraphs. It comes directly from what’s happening right now, not written out beforehand and rehearsed. For new teachers, I suspect giving talks is one of scarier things they have to learn to do. I was fortunate in that regard in two ways: one is I’m highly verbal already, and the other is that I used to coach presenters and speakers for a living, so I already understood the skills and the process. Even so, to get up in front of a group of practitioners and offer something useful to them is a challenge, especially when some of them have been in robes longer than you’ve been practicing! Thus new teachers tend to completely script themselves and then read their notes to the audience, or they just do book reports: I read this great book over the weekend and I want to share it with you today. The author says . . . Well, what do YOU say? What are YOU bringing to this talk? Beginners think they have nothing to add to the conversation. Hmmmm. If we can get past that point of ego and self-clinging, that’s where the juice is. I love visiting college classes and just batting questions back and forth. They ask interesting stuff and then I need to respond in that moment, drawing on all my study but also all my direct experience. Every year when we do the shuso hossen and the shuso takes questions from the sangha, that’s the part that makes them nervous and keeps them up at night: no notes, no prep, just you and the question and everyone watching and listening. They go straight for emptiness and the absolute in every answer because it’s an easy way to avoid the tough questions, and we tend to be nice and let them off the hook. That experience is designed to make us get out of our own way as teachers and just let the dharma come out -- believe me, it’s in there! When we open our mouths and get out of the way, something comes out (where did that come from?) If you get out of the way, it’s way more fun then tying yourself up in knots trying to give an intellectual discourse. Most of us here are laypeople and are never going to do a shuso hossen, and don’t consider ourselves dharma teachers, so why do we care about this unrestricted teisho thing? Well, have you ever been presented with a question that puts you on the spot? What do you think of your coworker’s performance on this project? Do you know why I’ve called you into my office (or why I’ve pulled your car over?) Daddy, is there really a Santa Claus? A tooth fairy? a God? How about when your sister or your friend says: Why me? Why did this terrible thing happen to me? I’m a good person, just doing my best to live. What do you say? Do you think you’re not called on to respond skillfully from a place of practice in this moment? You are if you’re a bodhisattva, which we’ve all vowed to be. Unrestricted speech partnered with the dharma eye is one of the most important tools we’ve got. Questions for reflection and discussion:
The wisdom view is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] wisdom is realized and fulfilled. 慧見是法明門、智惠成就滿足故。 Somehow, we need to see or view things in a certain way that we call wisdom so we can make that wisdom concrete in the world. It’s important that the English word being used here is "wisdom" rather than "knowledge" or "understanding." Wisdom in English is about taking everything you’ve learned and experienced and that’s given you a deep and clear vision of the universe and using that to exercise good judgement. Uchiyama Roshi says wisdom or prajna is the foundation from which we make choices. (1) With wisdom, every time we make a choice we make it from the point of view of interconnectedness. What’s the best thing for the network of interdependent origination? Does this put wholesomeness into the world, or unwholesomeness -- and not just for me. It’s the broadest possible view. Wisdom of course is the counter to ignorance. Ignorance means not understanding how universe actually works and relying instead on the stuff we make up in our heads. Ignorance is one of the three poisons. along with greed and anger, that’s at the root of all human suffering. It s’s safe to say that no one is completely wise or completely ignorant; we’re all carrying and balancing these two things all the time. Sometimes we’re able to take a clear and expansive view, and sometimes we’re really stuck in how we wish things were. This isn't the first time we’ve encountered a gate dealing with wisdom; when we talked about the 37 factors of awakening, that included a group of five faculties that lead to liberation. One of those (Gate 62) was wisdom, or prajna, which is said to be the highest virtue: The faculty of wisdom is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we really see all dharmas. We also talked about the six paramitas, one of which is wisdom. Gate 92 says, The wisdom pāramitā is a gate of Dharma illumination; for [with it] we eradicate the darkness of ignorance, together with attachment to views, and we teach and guide foolish living beings. Let's do a quick review of what we know already about wisdom in this tradition, and then consider what this gate statement is adding to that discussion. Wisdom is the largest possible view, the umbrella that includes all these teachings and gates, or we could say that these teachings are all aspects or elements pointing to wisdom. We need to understand how each of these aspects is connected to wisdom; otherwise we can use them for good or bad, wholesomeness or unwholesomeness. From the five faculties that lead to liberation: faith, effort, mindfulness and concentration are no good if they don’t contain wisdom. From the paramitas: diligence, patience, generosity and all other paramitas aren’t actually perfections unless they contain wisdom. Ethics or morality doesn’t work without wisdom either. Okumura Roshi has said that without prajna the precepts become a lifeless set of rules. We can just apply them rigidly without actually seeing the circumstances of this moment. If we strictly applied “do not kill,” for example, we couldn’t eat. We can make the same mistake in zazen. If I think this is “my” zazen, designed to make me better at getting what I want and being self-centered, that’s zazen without prajna. Wisdom encompasses both thinking and non-thinking. Even in zazen, it's not that thinking is bad and nonthinking is good. It’s not that we never use our intellect or discriminating mind. We just need to see that there’s something beyond thinking and not thinking, or form and emptiness. There’s nothing left out of wisdom. Wisdom holds it all. Since prajna is all about reality, it’s not just an abstract thing. It’s what helps us understand what our lives are really about and how to conduct our lives in this concrete world. Prajna puts us right in the middle of this place and time, seeing everything with nothing left out. Buddha’s wisdom is what arises when we open the hand of thought, and opening the hand is something we do, not something we think or imagine or conceptualize. It’s very difficult to talk about holding two sides of one reality, so the only way we can study it is to do it and experience it. That's a matter of not creating a separate self, not following our habit of five skandhas clinging to five skandhas. This clinging happens because of ignorance, the opposite of wisdom. Ignorance or delusion is a fundamental misunderstanding of reality that’s at the heart of all suffering. If you’ve been here listening to Okumura Roshi’s dharma talks over the years, you’ve heard him speak more than once about the five eyes, a teaching from the Diamond Sutra. If so, you might be thinking, oh -- wisdom view in this gate is the same as the prajna eye in the five eyes. I did too at first -- but now I don’t think so. Let's do a quick review here:
Again, the prajna or wisdom eye in these five eyes sees emptiness. It sees that all conditioned things are without a permanent self-nature because the causes and conditions that lead to them are changing all the time. But in doing that, it starts to ignore form. It can get so caught up in emptiness that it doesn’t distunguish between beings or things. It has the wisdom to see beyond form, but then it doesn’t come back, and on that basis, this wisdom is not completely realized in the world. Thus this eye is smart, but only so much so. It still needs the dharma eye that knows how to save beings in this real, samsaric world. Taking the wisdom view in this gate is being able to choose this actual reality of our lives over our fabrications, our ideas and stories and how we wish things were, and then, having chosen this complete and realistic view, knowing what to do next as a bodhisattva. We’re not cultivating a lofty, mystical view so that we can sit on top of the mountain in a purple cloud and enjoy a magical experience. We’re also not cultivating special powers that we can use for our own ends. We might aspire to be sages or wizards, but the bodhisattva is more than that. As bodhisattvas we use whatever powers or abilities we have to actively liberate beings. This gate says wisdom is realized and fulfilled. We make wisdom real and tangible in the world, and that’s what gives it meaning. In other words, that’s where wisdom is fulfilled. Doing something fulfilling is doing something with deep meaning and purpose, something satisfying, not to our small-self-ego but to our larger bodhisattva aspiration. We need the wisdom view in order for that to work, and wisdom or the universe needs us in order for that work to happen. No matter how universal our aspirations are, in this life at least we’re using this karmically conditioned body/mind to do that work, and it’s useful to know that the human condition is such that we need three things in order to feel like what we’re doing is fulfilling. 1) We need to feel like bodhisattva practice we’re doing personally matters to us, that we care about it and are interested in it, and that we’re leading our own lives in an authentic way. I don’t see how this happens without drawing on the wisdom that arises when the small self gets out of the way, and that’s ironic, isn’t it, because that’s when our personal lives become authentic. If all we’re doing is relying on our own ideas, or even what buddhas and ancestors tell us, without directly practicing and experiencing that wisdom for ourselves, somehow we’re going to feel inauthentic and like we’re separate from what we’re doing. It doesn’t matter to us in a direct and personal way. We’re just acting out our fantasies or putting on someone else’s clothes and playing a part. We don’t care, it’s not interesting or authentic, it doesn’t matter, and it’s not fulfilling or satisfying. 2) We need to feel that we’re making good use of the things we know and know how to do. Now that we’re cultivating this wisdom, what are we doing with it? Our karmic circumstances are all different. We’ve all got different skills, abiliies, experiences, interests, talents and capacities. I have a terrible sense of direction on a good day, but I’m pretty good at knitting a sweater or formatting a document. Someone else might not have any experience as a doan but be good at woodworking. All of that stuff falls under the big umbrella called wisdom. As bodhisattvas, we’re always doing discernment. What can I offer, and how do I do that? We might not think we have anything to offer in a given situation, but acting on wisdom in that moment sometimes isn’t what we think it is. It’s not having the answer to every problem, or dispensing a lot of sage advice, or fixing every broken mechanical object or computer in the place. Wisdom can be having the discretion and maturity not to repeat someone’s confidential information to others, or knowing that what someone needs right now is a hot meal, or being able to rephrase information in a way that someone can understand. When we have capacity to offer our natural abilities or our learned skills to others who need them, that’s the fulfillment of wisdom. It makes us feel like our lives are worthwhile when there’s an outlet for what we can offer. 3) We need to feel like our bodhisattva practice is making a difference for others now and in the future, that we’re having a positive impact and perhaps leaving a meaningful legacy, that we’re doing something with our lives that matters to others. Of course, we know because we’re part of the network of interconnectedness that everythng we do affects other beings; since we’re not really separated from others, we can’t help but have an impact. We also know because of cause and effect that everything we do plants seeds that will unfold across space and time. We often don’t see the outcome of what we set in motion, either because causes and conditions are complicated or because it takes a lifetime or more for that unfolding to come to fruition. Thus, for human beings, fulfillment is
Now we have a real challenge with regard to fulfillment. It would be so, so easy to use our personal satisfaction as the yardstick of success. This “I” wants a fulfilling life based on what I think that will bring me, that people will admire or love me or that I’ll simply feel good about myself and my ability to help others. How do we do this “wisdom is realized and fulfilled” without engaging in a lot of self clinging? If we’re really taking the wisdom view, we’re not stuck in our restricted small-self world. We’re seeing the small self and completely appreciating it for what it is. That includes all of our karmic circumstances that allow us to give what we can give, whether that’s our ability to make a great pizza or our ability to do brilliant cardiothoracic surgery. As Dogen says, all of our six senses are themselves instances of prajna, so wisdom is not just the working of the mind. Wisdom is realized when we simply function wholesomely and concretely in the world. At the same time, we also see that the five skandhas are empty, that there’s no small self that has a permanent nature or that we can grab onto and claim as "me," so we can ask ourselves what we’re really feeding with the need of this “I” for a fulfilling life. Is there anything there? Now when we say that wisdom is being fulfilled, we have to be careful because one sense of fulfillment is completion, and in so many aspects of our practice, fulfillment or completion is impossible. Yet we still make the attempt. We take bodhisattva vows knowing we can never fulfill, or complete, those vows, which have no beginning, end, front, back, or outside edges. We’ll never save all beings, extinguish all our desires, make it through all dharma gates, or make Buddha’s boundless (or boundary-less) way real or concrete in every possible way. In the same way, there’s no end or completion to wisdom. There’s no end point at which we say we’re as wise as possible. There’s no end point at which we’ve completely exhaused wisdom in the service of beings. Where is the outside edge of wisdom? Wisdom is simply the total dynamic functioning of this reality. There’s certainly no end to that, because there’s no separation between the actors and the functioning. There’s no stepping outside of this moment of unified reality. In this sense the fulfillment of wisdom is the recognition or understanding that there is nothing outside of this moment of the total functioning of wisdom. Something is being cultivated and developed and turned around back into the world for the benefit of other beings, and that wisdom is also the support coming to us as living beings for the continuation of our own lives and practice. There’s no separation between any of these elements, and fulfillment is already there and happening. A few of us had a conversation recently about the nature of the circle of the way and how our practice life is not a linear thing, where we’re cultivating something in order to get from here to there, pointing outward and taking something away from the circle of functioning for ourselves. Instead we don’t really have any choice but to return whatever we’re doing to the circle of the way because we’re not actually pointed away from it; that’s not possible. By its nature, a circle is always coimplete, or we might say fulfilled. In our tradition we have the phrase gyoji dokan. Gyoji is practice and dokan is preservation or maintenance, and together they mean continuous practice of the way. Sometimes we use the image of a circle for this. There are dozens of Western Zen centers that use a brush painted circle as their logo, or they use it somewhere in their branding. It makes sense as an image of a nonlinear path. We don’t go from here to there because there’s nothing other than here and we just keep coming back to that. As Dogen says repeatedly. practice and awakening are not two. Aspiration, practice, awakening and Nirvana arise together. Not only are the two ends of the line connected into a circle, but travel on the circle doesn’t have a direction. In this view it’s not necessary to decide whether whatever we’re doing is meaningful to us, whether we’re making “good” use of whatever we can offer, whether we’re making a difference or enough of a difference for others -- in other words, whether we feel fulfilled. Sawaki Roshi says, "If you aren’t careful, you’ll spend your whole life doing nothing besides waiting for your ordinary-person hopes to someday be fulfilled." Elsewhere he says, "Living out the buddha-dharma means fulfilling your function completely without knowing that you’re doing it. A mountain doesn’t know it’s tall. The sea doesn’t know it’s wide and deep. Each and every thing in the universe is active without knowing it." Wisdom and the action that arises from that wisdom and the person doing the action and the recipient of action aren’t really separate. One other thing we need to notice about image of circle: the inside is empty! Case 77 of the Book of Serenity says “The empty space of dokan is never filled up.” The circle of the way, the fulfillment of wisdom, starts with no-self or emptiness. The wisdom view that understands the nature of self and the five skandhas is the foundation for making that wisdom concrete in the world, and in that moment wisdom is fulfilled because there’s nowhere around the circle that it doesn’t reach. Note: (1) See Deepest Practice, Deepest Wisdom: Three Fascicles from Shobogenzo with Commentary. (2018). United States: Wisdom Publications, p. 15. Questions for reflection and discussion:
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About the text
The Ippyakuhachi Homyomon, or 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination, appears as the 11th fascicle of the 12 fascicle version of Dogen Zenji’s Shobogenzo. Dogen didn't compile the list himself; it's mostly a long quote from another text called the Sutra of Collected Past Deeds of the Buddha. Dogen wrote a final paragraph recommending that we investigate these gates thoroughly. Hoko talked about the gates one by one between 2016 and 2024. She provides material here that can be used by weekly dharma discussion groups as well as for individual study. The 108 Gates of Dharma Illumination
[1] Right belief [2] Pure mind [3] Delight [4] Love and cheerfulness The three forms of behavior [5] Right conduct of the actions of the body [6] Pure conduct of the actions of the mouth [7] Pure conduct of the actions of the mind The six kinds of mindfulness [8] Mindfulness of Buddha [9] Mindfulness of Dharma [10] Mindfulness of Sangha [11] Mindfulness of generosity [12] Mindfulness of precepts [13] Mindfulness of the heavens The four Brahmaviharas [14] Benevolence [15] Compassion [16] Joy [17] Abandonment The four dharma seals [18] Reflection on inconstancy [19] Reflection on suffering [20] Reflection on there being no self [21] Reflection on stillness [22] Repentance [23] Humility [24] Veracity [25] Truth [26] Dharma conduct [27] The Three Devotions [28] Recognition of kindness [29] Repayment of kindness [30] No self-deception [31] To work for living beings [32] To work for the Dharma [33] Awareness of time [34] Inhibition of self-conceit [35] The nonarising of ill-will [36] Being without hindrances [37] Belief and understanding [38] Reflection on impurity [39] Not to quarrel [40] Not being foolish [41] Enjoyment of the meaning of the Dharma [42] Love of Dharma illumination [43] Pursuit of abundant knowledge [44] Right means [45] Knowledge of names and forms [46] The view to expiate causes [47] The mind without enmity and intimacy [48] Hidden expedient means [49] Equality of all elements [50] The sense organs [51] Realization of nonappearance The elements of bodhi: The four abodes of mindfulness [52] The body as an abode of mindfulness [53] Feeling as an abode of mindfulness [54] Mind as an abode of mindfulness [55] The Dharma as an abode of mindfulness [56] The four right exertions [57] The four bases of mystical power The five faculties [58] The faculty of belief [59] The faculty of effort [60] The faculty of mindfulness [61] The faculty of balance [62] The faculty of wisdom The five powers [63] The power of belief [64] The power of effort [65] The power of mindfulness [66] The power of balance [67] The power of wisdom [68] Mindfulness, as a part of the state of truth [69] Examination of Dharma, as a part of the state of truth [70] Effort, as a part of the state of truth [71] Enjoyment, as a part of the state of truth [72] Entrustment as a part of the state of truth [73] The balanced state, as a part of the state of truth [74] Abandonment, as a part of the state of truth The Eightfold Path [75] Right view [76] Right discrimination [77] Right speech [78] Right action [79] Right livelihood [80] Right practice [81] Right mindfulness [82] Right balanced state [83] The bodhi-mind [84] Reliance [85] Right belief [86] Development The six paramitas [87] The dāna pāramitā [88] The precepts pāramitā [89] The forbearance pāramitā. [90] The diligence pāramitā [91] The dhyāna pāramitā [92] The wisdom pāramitā [93] Expedient means [94] The four elements of sociability [95] To teach and guide living beings [96] Acceptance of the right Dharma [97] Accretion of happiness [98] The practice of the balanced state of dhyāna [99] Stillness [100] The wisdom view [101] Entry into the state of unrestricted speech [102] Entry into all conduct [103] Accomplishment of the state of dhāraṇī [104] Attainment of the state of unrestricted speech [105] Endurance of obedient following [106] Attainment of realization of the Dharma of nonappearance [107] The state beyond regressing and straying [108] The wisdom that leads us from one state to another state and, somehow, one more: [109] The state in which water is sprinkled on the head Archives
December 2025
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