Hoko's key messages about fuji
Nonduality is the basis for much of Dogen’s teaching. Uchiyama Roshi says that in the Shobogenzo, all words should be understood as meaning “beyond dichotomy.” He says we shouldn't set them in comparison with or relative to each other: life and death, poverty and wealth, happiness and unhappiness. Dogen is constantly collapsing duality, which is not the same as denying that forms exist. A and B both exist, but it’s also true that they are not separate and therefore their existence as apparently unconnected things isn’t the whole story. There are five individual fingers and also one hand. Once we understand that, we also have to go beyond the idea that there is A and B and beyond-A-and-B, because otherwise we’re just perpetuating discrimination between things.
When we understand emptiness, then we can see that on one hand, things have characteristics and seem to be solid and permanent, and on the other, nothing has a fixed and permanent self-nature, so as soon as we give something labels and descriptions, it’s changed and those ideas don’t apply. Thusness is the aspect of the world before we distinguish individual forms and try to describe them.
Dogen’s world is not a world of either/or; it’s a world of yes/and. There isn’t only one right answer to a question or a koan, and multiple answers don’t cancel each other out. Things can coexist in his world that to us seem mutually exclusive. Thus practice and enlightenment are not separate, and things in the world and absolute reality are not separate.
Imagine seeing the world not as a series of choices between this and that, which is what we habitually assume needs to happen (light and dark, winning and losing, delusion and awakening, like and dislike, good and bad), but as a series of elements that aren’t actually opposed to each other. What if each thing simply is what it is, without fighting for its place against something opposite? Those opposites are just our own creations based on our perception.
When we understand emptiness, then we can see that on one hand, things have characteristics and seem to be solid and permanent, and on the other, nothing has a fixed and permanent self-nature, so as soon as we give something labels and descriptions, it’s changed and those ideas don’t apply. Thusness is the aspect of the world before we distinguish individual forms and try to describe them.
Dogen’s world is not a world of either/or; it’s a world of yes/and. There isn’t only one right answer to a question or a koan, and multiple answers don’t cancel each other out. Things can coexist in his world that to us seem mutually exclusive. Thus practice and enlightenment are not separate, and things in the world and absolute reality are not separate.
Imagine seeing the world not as a series of choices between this and that, which is what we habitually assume needs to happen (light and dark, winning and losing, delusion and awakening, like and dislike, good and bad), but as a series of elements that aren’t actually opposed to each other. What if each thing simply is what it is, without fighting for its place against something opposite? Those opposites are just our own creations based on our perception.
