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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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