Gate ​109: Water sprinkled on the head

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.

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Questions for reflection and discussion:

• How has birth into your human family influenced your practice?  What have you learned about the dharma from interacting with family members?
• What have you come to understand through your own practice that has influenced how you interact with others?  
• What have been the one or two most influential dharma gates you've encountered and experienced?  How did those experiences shape your practice?
• What keeps you committed to practice?