Ten Tips for Reading Dogen

Carve these words on your skin, flesh, bones, and marrow; on your body, mind, and environs; on emptiness and on form. They are already carved on trees and rocks, on fields and villages.

— Dogen, Sansuikyo (trans. Kazuaki Tanahashi, et al.)

*****

Dipping for the first time into Dogen’s Shobogenzo can be a little like a reader’s first encounters with James Joyce. Although there are some works that seem fairly accessible, like Dubliners or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, others are either a delightful if difficult surprise (Ulysses) or an impenetrable mystery (Finnegans Wake). 

Recently someone asked after zazen about how to read Dogen and several suggestions emerged. From “read very slowly, just a phrase at a time” to “let it wash over you like a tsunami.”

Is there any wrong way to read Dogen? Not really. But here are some suggestions that I have found helpful in navigating his often opaque and profoundly moving prose.

1. Start with Fukenzazengi. 

Following these brief instructions for practicing zazen (and then practicing zazen) is the best preparation for reading Dogen. 

2. Remember the context.

Remember that Dogen is mostly talking to monks in a monastic setting. So not everything applies to you here and now. He can be very prescriptive about very personal activities, like going to the toilet. But you don’t have to take that for gospel, just as you would not want to take all Gospel for gospel. Approach his medieval exhortations with a granary of salt.

3. Read closely, then step away.

There is nothing wrong with close reading, careful reading, scholarly reading that brings all the resources of criticism and philology and philosophy to bear. Kodo Sawaki said that all the commentaries on the sutras are but a footnote to zazen. But footnotes can be helpful. Still, there are limitations imposed on even the most talented linguists by Dogen’s syntax, semantics, and grammar, which are inaccessible to us who are not fluent in thirteenth-century Japanese, as well as to those who are.

4. Triangulate your translations.

Since most of us will not be reading Shobogenzo in the original Japanese, we should not get too attached to words and phrases, even when they sound lovely and touch us deeply. I always try to read anything by Dogen in at least three translations: the most accessible, by Kazuaki Tanahashi and others; the most literal, by Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross; and the most explanatory, by Kosen Nishiyama. Since Dogen’s meaning is just beyond the grasp of words (in any language), we should not be too insistent on interpretations or words (in any language).

5. Read with your gut.

My teacher used to say, “Think with the body, act with the brain.” Like hishiryo consciousness, which arises during zazen, called at times “thinking not-thinking,” our experience of Dogen’s texts should not incorporate only the thinking brain (reason, logic, scholarship and such) but also the not-thinking gut (or hara, where spontaneous wisdom resides). This process we might call “reading not-reading.”

6. Consider his fascicles as tapas or mezes, not a feast.

Since we are reading with our gut, we need to remember that one can easily overdose on Dogen. His food for thought is rich and can cause indigestion if taken in large quantities. It does no good to binge and purge on Being-Time. I once had a student who wanted to cover two or three fascicles in a sitting; he soon became a Catholic instead.

7. Back and forth.

Dogen’s syntax is not our syntax. Just as form becomes emptiness and emptiness becomes form, so Dogen’s subjects become predicates and predicates become subjects. So while we can hear “to study the self is to forget the self,” we must also perceive the unheard echo, “to forget the self is to study the self.” Sequence and narrative are our citadels of meaning, but Dogen tears these down because in the dharma there is no north or south (except, evidently, when placing a lavatory: see his toilet training for monks in Senjo). Neither is there forward or backward.

8. Just don’t know.

“I want to understand Dogen” is the eager and admirable intention of the beginner. However, when we give up the search for this chimera of complete understanding, we begin to see how Dogen can help us to understand our own practice, which is a much more helpful result. Dharma gates are innumerable; I vow to penetrate them all. So don’t be afraid to not know when reading Dogen. Like the gateless gates of koans, the wall we face is a mirror as well as a window as well as just a wall. But as Seung Sahn would say, “Just be sure that you don’t know ‘don’t know’!”

9. Allow yourself to be moved emotionally.

Sometimes we bear down so hard on a text with our analytical brains that we forget to be moved by the music and mystery of words (even more magical sometimes in translation). In his Mountains and Waters Sutra (Sansuikyo), Dogen transcends poetry and prose, as well as incantations and allusions, and speaks directly to the psyche. I have been struck dumb by this fascicle without understanding a word of it, yet resonating with its force like a struck drum weeping.

10. End with Fukenzazengi. 

In the end, the only validation of our understanding of Dogen (or our knowing not-knowing what he might have been saying) is our experience of zazen. Take your reading to your zafu, not your zafu to your reading. And enjoy.

— Richard Collins

https://learnjapaneseaz.com/

Zensplainers

Long practice does not necessarily make for strong practice.

Every dojo has one. 

He is the one who has been around for a while, often having practiced at several different dojos, and thinks he knows something because he has put in his time on the cushion. I say “he” because it is almost always a male. Zensplainers suffer from the same malady as mansplainers. 

He is the one who will correct your movements in the dojo, from the moment you step over the raised threshold with the wrong foot until the moment you gassho and bow out forever, saying, “If that guy is what I’ll turn into if I practice Zen for a long time, I’m out of here!”

In the most virulent form, he can become a Zen Nazi, barking and threatening and abusing his authority, although in a good dojo he would never get any real authority. Most Zensplainers are just more like Zen uncles at Thanksgiving, annoyingly avuncular and out of touch with the present reality.

Some Zensplaineres will correct you only about the forms, to which they are terminally attached. Others, however, will also attempt to engage you in sophistic Dharma Combat, even though they have never gone through the formal hossen shiki ceremony to make them a teacher. 

He is particularly compelled to Zensplain to newcomers, although no one is really safe, including the master. The veteran Zensplainer will also offer his unsolicited corrections to anyone younger or “less experienced” than he is, even if that person has been given authority that he has not, especially if that person is a woman. He would willingly usurp their authority if they allow him to be as “helpful” as he would like.

There are at least two problems with Zensplainers. 

First, like mansplainers, they think they are being helpful but really they are only helping their own egos. They are like Charles Johnson’s Herman Wilder, shouting on Echo Mountain: “Herman Wilder is a most enlightened fellow!” 

Second, and again like mansplainers, they are often wrong.

The root of this problem is partly in the ego. These old-timers like to think that they have learned something and can only demonstrate this by instructing others. They want to share, but what they are sharing is outmoded and, worse, wrongheaded. Zensplaining behavior shows that they have learned nothing. If they had, they would sit down and shut up and attend to their own practice, cherishing their beginner’s mind, instead of aspiring to teach.

Long practice does not necessarily make for strong practice. Investing one’s time is no different than investing one’s money. As Bodhidharma told Emperor Bu, who had invested time and money in Zen by building many temples, “NO MERIT! Vast emptiness. Nothing sacred.”

Every dojo has one. 

— Richard Collins

Cartoon by Charles Johnson

Attachments and Obligations

Everything worthwhile in life is a paradox.

I have been reading Ihara Saikaku’s Life of an Amorous Woman. It’s a collection of his koshokubon, or erotic writings, including “The Tale of Seijuro from Himeji, the Town of the Lovely Damsel.” In this story the young man, Seijuro, is living a dissolute life consorting with all eighty-five of the courtesans of his small town. One day he has them all undress together to satisfy his whim to recreate in the flesh the so-called “Isle of Nakedness,” which he has only seen on a Chinese map. When the artfulness of the women’s dress and half-dress is cast off, it becomes clear that they owe their seductive attraction mostly to the artistry of their clothing which conceals in each of them some physical flaw — flaws when revealed in the light of their nakedness dampens the lust in the men. 

There is a lesson to be learned here about how art disguises nature, about appearance and reality, about the illusion of desire, and so on. But that’s nothing new, we know all that — that is not the most interesting part of the story. 

At this point Seijuro’s father bursts in and, disgusted with the scene, disowns his decadent son. Disgraced, the son contemplates suicide and half expects his favorite courtesan, the young Minakawa, to accompany him. Except that she reminds him that it’s the nature of her job to change her affections from one man to another, so it’s sayonara Seijuro. 

There is another, more interesting lesson to be learned here about mujo, impermanence, the transitory nature of desire; that passion is fleeting and fickle, especially in the floating world. And there is a reason the founder of Zen, Daruma, in addition to being a child’s toy in Japan, is associated with prostitutes. But that’s not what I want to talk about, either.

What I want to talk about is why Minakawa says she can’t commit suicide with her favorite lover, Seijuro. She begs off, saying that she has “attachments to the world.” By this she means not only desires and longings for the material and sensual delights (what in a Buddhist context we might normally think of as attachments) but rather something more intangible and compelling — obligations. She may, for example, owe money to the house and madame she belongs to, or there might be other duties that death would make it impossible for her to fulfill once she took that step, much as she might like to accompany Seijuro out of this world. 

This set me to thinking in a new way, or at least in a nuanced way, about attachments — in the Buddhist sense and in my own life — as obligations rather than just longings or desires. Longings and desires are not only easy to contemplate leaving behind, but they can drive us, like Seijuro, to think about ending them by self-destruction — and this escape becomes yet another in the long spiral of seductions. But so long as one has obligations, one cannot honorably absent oneself from the world. That would be the height of selfishness in Tokugawa era society. It is only when disability or dishonor makes it impossible to fulfill one’s obligations that one is not only allowed but sometimes bound to end one’s worldly existence. 

Instead of committing suicide, the eighteen-year-old Seijuro becomes a monk (although not for long). One might say that he leaves the world symbolically. Minakawa, on the other hand, does manage, inexplicably it seems after all her reasonable objections, to kill herself in actuality. Seijuro’s ordination is the less permanent solution to their temporary problem, since he will live to love another day.

Becoming a monk means giving up not only attachments to personal desires, but also to social obligations. This is the meaning of the home-leaving part of our ordination ceremony. Yet there is a tension here, a contradiction, and it is this that I find most interesting. At the same time that monastics leave their worldly obligations behind on one level, yet they pick up other heavier obligations on another level. For what are we bodhisattvas but beings who embrace our obligation to save all beings? We don’t strive to be arhats or lohans, enlightened beings detached from the world, basking in the glow of a premature nirvana. On the contrary, our job is much more nuanced, difficult, and interesting.

Like the young Seijuro, I was once like a floating weed, free and unattached — and often miserable in the unbearable lightness of being, disrobing the world and reveling in revealing its blemishes. The erotic world was all in all for me, my religion, I suppose. The world of shiki — of color, form, sensuality, texture — was all I cared about, that and elegance and intelligence and beauty. It was only when I became a monk — and before that, a bodhisattva — that I became truly engaged and embraced my obligations. It was only then that I finally gave up the seductive idea of suicide and took on the burdens that paradoxically grounded me in a sort of freedom I had never known.

The attachment of obligation saved me. My duty to the temple, my duty to Robert, my teacher, saved me. My duty to my wife and daughters saved me (that was always available but somehow I had always managed to shirk it). My obligation to you, my Zen students, saves me every day.

This is the meaning and value of sangha. It’s not about friendship or fellowship. It’s not about some personal spiritual enlightenment. It’s about the power of the obligation to save all beings. We save each other without even knowing it, without even trying. It’s not about you. It’s not about me. It’s not even about us. Zazen teaches us this without words, without nuance. It’s all about seeing the world in the nakedness of ku, emptiness. No matter how lightly we wear this obligation, it is about the reason to go on. To endure.

The etymology of obligation derives from the Latin, and it has to do with a formal and binding pledge, a pledge that we take in the form of the ordination vows, those four impossible obligations: to save all beings, to drop all illusions, to penetrate all gateless gates, to be buddhas here and now. But it is important to note that we attach ourselves to these vows in the same way that we attach ourselves to water when entering a stream. You have heard me say before: attachment is not a problem, attachment is natural — it’s attachment to attachment that is neurotic. You can no more cling to your vows than you can cling to the waters of the stream: they cling to you, naturally, like Dogen’s fish swimming in the ocean. 

We must take care, then, not to become attached to our attachments, nor obligated to our obligations. Otherwise we become rigid and pious when we should be pliant and lighthearted. Are these contradictions? Yes. Are they paradoxes? Yes. Everything worthwhile in life is a paradox. 

— Richard Collins

A Parade of Courtesans (c. 1690) Hishikawa Moronobu

Splitting Hairs with Hairs

Mondo: 17 October 2021

Question: “What is the difference between delusion and illusion?’

Question: “What is the difference between kensho and satori?”

We have to remember, first of all, that these distinctions and definitions are just words, arbitrary names that can only approximate our experience. They are useful signposts, but not accurate descriptions of reality. 

That said, for me, delusion is located in or originates from our minds, while illusion is located outside in the world or is perpetrated there. A delusion is an inaccurate representation of reality in our mind, one that we create, while illusion is something that is out there, often created for us, like a trompe l’oeil effect, a mirage, a trick of perception or a social construction, the values and prejudices that are foisted upon us, or fake news. Our dangerous delusions can often be spurred by the context of illusions provided for us. We could also say that delusions are the psychosis of illusion. 

It is important that in Zen we drop both delusion and illusion. We must deconstruct or dissolve them, both rationally through reason and evidence (shiki), but also through the insights of zazen that transcend science (ku). As we discover the illusions we have been fed, we must deconstruct them scientifically, but also dissolve the delusions we feed ourselves, spiritually. My delusions of grandeur or inferiority have to be corrected so that I see myself for who I really am, neither so grand nor so inferior as I might think (or fear, or hope). We crack the illusions of the world around us so that we might shatter the delusions that obstruct our potential. 

The illusions, for example, of advertising, the algorithms of Amazon, the ethics of religion, the propaganda of politics, the curricula of education, the expectations of parents, and so on. These are the ideological bars of our delusional prisonhouse, the matrix of illusion that we know is there but that can be difficult for us to escape. This is our job, though, in Zen practice: to break through these ideological cages, making an effort to drop our delusions, to penetrate the truth behind the illusions, to unveil the wizard behind the curtain, even when the wizard is ourselves.

Kensho and satori are related to this effort, in that they are words to describe the experience of penetrating the dharma gates that disguise reality. 

Kensho is a glimpse through the gateless gate, that transparent barrier that is also opaque; it is a crack in the glass. Satori, on the other hand, shatters it, to open a sudden panoramic vista. Illusion and delusion drop off.

These epiphanies, or realizations, are, however, only the aura of enlightenment. They are the residue, the trace of what leaves no residue, no trace. Kensho and satori are measurements of what can’t be measured, descriptions of what can’t be described, words for what cannot be spoken.

This is why Kodo Sawaki is so right when he speaks of satori, sometimes as a form of delusion, sometimes as a form of illusion. “Delusion itself is satori.” Or, “No illusion is as hard to cure as satori.” And “Satori doesn’t mean the end of illusion.” And his most profound statement on satori: “Satori is like a thief breaking into an empty house.”

Do you see how when we speak of illusion and delusion, of kensho and satori, we are splitting hairs with hairs? 

— Richard Collins

Direction without Goals

Most people’s direction is determined by their goals. In Zen our goals are determined by our direction.

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I attended my first sesshin. It was also the sesshin when I was ordained, 30 September 2001. I was just forty-nine, but I remember it was very painful for my aging bones -- my knees blew up like overripe melons. Still, it was exactly what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be. No, not “wanted” exactly, but rather where I knew I belonged.

It was not long after 9/11 and my wife was pregnant with our daughter Isabel. I was pregnant too. Sometime before that, I recall sitting (an approximate pink human lotus with persnickety knees)  in the steam room at the New Orleans Athletic Club, and thinking “There’s a buddha in my belly.” No, not “thinking” exactly; it was more like a physical sensation, as though the little bugger in my hara had kicked. 

Isabel is now in college. This summer she and I translated Philippe Coupey’s new book, Zen Fragments. In this candid little “memoir of flesh and blood,” Coupey tells about meeting Maitre Deshimaru and how he owed him an immense debt of gratitude because Sensei helped him find his direction. It is a “rare thing,” says Coupey, for someone to find their direction. He writes:

I owe a lot to him. Thanks to Master Deshimaru I found a direction for my life. It is a rare thing for someone to know what direction to take, to follow their highest aspirations. This is not to say that Zen and Deshimaru are the be-all and the end-all in this world; it is just that it is impossible for me to think that I could have followed any other path. 

I know the feeling. I knew as soon as I walked into the temple in New Orleans in January of 2001 that I would continue to practice. But at that first sesshin I knew I had found my direction, that “rare thing.” 

We are all pregnant with possibility. But we often smother it without ever finding out what it is because we are intent on preconceived goals. The real path might seem like a detour when it arises. What is it Blake says in the Proverbs of Hell? “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” This is usually taken (by the repressed advocates of Heaven) to mean criminal urges, but the advocates of Hell represent Energy (or Qi) in all its forms, and so they also reign over those other, even more dangerous desires -- our “highest aspirations.”

To paraphrase Blake then, let me put it this way: better to smother an infant in its cradle than to neglect the potential of our highest aspirations.

I am not talking here about the kind of desire that has goals, cupiditas (lust or greed), those that long merely to possess something or someone. I am talking about the goalless desire to follow our “highest aspirations” without attachment of any kind. We don’t need to confuse the two.

Most people live their lives chasing after goals. And it is these goals that determine their direction. What a terrible way to live! If you live for your goals, you can only be disappointed. If you don’t achieve your goals, you feel like a failure. And if you do achieve them, you also feel like a failure because of what you have missed out on while focused on achieving your goals — only to discover that the goals, too, are illusory, empty.

What Coupey is talking about, of course, when he says he found “a direction” for his life, is that he has found the Way. And what is the Way but the path of the goalless goal? It is the path that is the goal. So-called goals are just scenic landmarks along the Way, spots to take a selfie and be on your way.

In Zen we find a direction without goals. Most people’s direction is determined by their goals. In Zen our goals are determined by our direction.

If your direction is right, then you don’t have to find your goals; your goals will find you. For the past twenty years, I have had this proven to me again and again. Every predetermined goal has been shattered or shabby when viewed up close, and every unexpected goal has been magical. You go in search of fame and fortune, or health and happiness, an Oscar or a Nobel Prize, and instead of Hollywood or Stockholm, you get the Emerald City or New Orleans.

The Romanian writer Ioan Couliano wrote a book called Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. His thesis, or rather the proposition that he explores, is something along the lines of this idea of direction. And how an intensity of direction (will or a deep desire that he calls eros) can achieve goals in a way that seems almost supernatural, and in fact did seem supernatural in the Renaissance but today can be explained by various branches of science, especially the psychological and sociological sciences. Because what could be more natural than achieving one’s goals without a specific intention (or casting spells) but simply by following one’s direction faithfully and finding what that authentic intentionality brings? Not the imposition of our desires on the landscape, but the landscape inspiring a desire for what actually already is.

The simplest things are the most magical. Realizing this is Zen.

— Richard Collins

“Of course some people do go both ways.”

Buddha Nature Knows No North or South

If you want to learn supreme enlightenment, don’t slight beginners.

-- Huineng, The Platform Sutra

We sometimes speak of warrior or samurai Zen versus farmer Zen — as though they were different. It’s part of the old debate going back at least as far as Huineng in the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch about the difference between sudden enlightenment and gradual enlightenment, the Northern School versus the Southern School. Later it will take shape as Rinzai versus Soto. And so on and so forth. 

These comparisons have only to do with our delusions. Comparisons between social classes or sexes are useless when it comes to Zen practice. Nor is it a matter of personality types. And we certainly don’t want to validate any doctrinal differences between geographical centers of practice. 

As the cheeky young Huineng tells his master, the Fifth Patriarch, “Buddha-nature originally knows no North or South.” 

Here at the New Orleans Zen Temple, we practice Soto Zen. It is called “farmer Zen” because we have to be patient. We plant a seed or transplant a seedling and watch it grow. Yes, we nurture it by watering it when the rain won’t come, teaching it how to breathe, or propping it up when its posture sags, but basically we plant it on a zafu and watch it grow over time, to put down roots, allowing it to stretch and strengthen its stalk, head pressing the sky, to spread its leaves and blossom. We watch how the plant transpires in every meaning of that word.

Then we send it out into the world where it will be battered and nourished with rain and sun, trodden on by the world’s business where it suffers and thrives. And if the practice is consistent, by which I mean strong, and strong, by which I mean consistent, then the plant will grow. Unconsciously, automatically, spontaneously, naturally. 

As Daichi Zenji says in the bodhisattva ordination of the samurai Kikushi, “With long experience, and thanks to the infinite grace of zazen, you will understand all this unconsciously. On a journey, it’s the long and dangerous road that reveals a horse’s strength and courage. And it isn’t overnight that we see and feel the goodness of the persons we live with.*

There is no sudden enlightenment; there is no gradual enlightenment. To make that distinction is not to understand the first thing about enlightenment. Rinzai or Soto. Samurai or Farmer. Male or Female. Buddha-nature knows no such distinctions. 

— Richard Collins

The Fourth Teaching

As you may know, the Chinese often refer to the Three Teachings. They are represented in paintings by the three teachers, who can be recognized by their iconography. The stately Confucius with his long combed beard and black scholar’s cap; the rugged Lao Tzu with his scraggily beard and hermit’s robe; and Shakyamuni Buddha, bald or with his ushnisha, the crown of hair. Sometimes Confucius is depicted as handing over a baby Buddha, the newest of the three, to Lao Tzu; sometimes they are on more equal terms. But the idea is that they are more or less harmonious and complementary systems of thought that together tell the history of Chinese religious philosophy, beginning with the two indigenous religions, the scholarship and order of Confucianism complemented by the spontaneity and naturalism of Taoism, and then the transplant from abroad, the transcendentalism of Indian Buddhism.  

Thanks to Clara for sharing the Daxue on Friday after zazen. This is one of the most famous Confucian texts, known as The Great Learning. Like the Hannya Shingyo, it is very short but profoundly influential. As with all Confucian thought, there is a great emphasis on the role of ritual and tradition in our moral and social life and on the connection of individual, familial, societal, and global order. 

There is an interesting controversy about the text among Neo-Confucian scholars about which virtues lead to which, or where to start. The passage in question is this:

The ancients who wished to manifest their clear character to the world would first bring order to their states. Those who wished to bring order to their states would first regulate their families. Those who wished to regulate their families would first cultivate their personal lives. Those who wished to cultivate their personal lives would first rectify their minds. Those who wished to rectify their minds would first make their wills sincere. Those who wished to make their wills sincere would first extend their knowledge. The extension of knowledge consists in the investigation of things. When things are investigated, knowledge is extended; when knowledge is extended, the will becomes sincere; when the will is sincere, the mind is rectified; when the mind is rectified, the personal life is cultivated; when the personal life is cultivated, the family will be regulated; when the family is regulated, the state will be in order; and when the state is in order, there will be peace throughout the world… All [of us] must regard cultivation of the personal life as the root or foundation. [Wing-Tsit Chan, editor and translator, A Sourcebook in Chinese Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963), 86-7.]

What constitutes the “cultivation of the personal life” is where the arguments begin. Some say that "investigating things" comes first (this might include both inductive and deductive investigations, observing the world, working from experience, and book learning, but also looking into oneself). Others argue that "sincerity of will" is primary, and that without it, there can be no clear apprehension of the way of the world.

I am no Confucian scholar. But this seems like a false dichotomy, at least from a Zen perspective. Surely there can be no value in "sincerity of will" if it is rooted in ignorance (ignorance, one of the poisons, not being the same thing as innocence, of course). We see lots of “sincere” people all around us, sincere but stupid. One can be perfectly sincere, but without knowledge of the way things are, or even rejecting evidence of how they are. In that case, one's actions can only be harmful to oneself and others. As Sylvia Townsend Warner describes some “sincere” characters in one of her novels, "Like many stupid people, they possessed acute instincts." Of course they do: that's how the stupid survive and even thrive in this world.

On the other hand, one can be knowledgeable about the world and act on that knowledge cynically. These people know how business works, how to make profits, how to exploit natural resources and how to exploit people (known to them not as people but as “human resources”). They know how to put out propaganda, and how to manage individuals and control populations; but they don't realize how destructive their actions can be, or they don't care. They are the bad capitalists, the bad socialists, the bad communists, the bad fascists, the bad anarchists. These people of course are also stupid; they are morally stupid.

Knowledge and sincerity must go hand in hand. Or as we might say, right thought must be married to right intention. Or more simply, we strive for the compassionate wisdom of the Hannya Shingyo, the wisdom that goes beyond. The practice of mushotoku.

* * *

You may have heard the story of the Three Vinegar Tasters. They are the same three sages or teachers from before. Standing at a barrel, each takes a taste of the bitterness of life. Confucius concludes that the wine used to be good but has gone bad; only the ancients were in harmony with life, and we are now out of control; only a strict adherence to order will bring us back in harmony. The Buddha tastes the bitterness of life and says that suffering is our lot in life; only our individual adherence to the eightfold path can bring an end to suffering in this life in the form of enlightenment and nirvana. Lao Tzu finds the vinegar to be just as it was supposed to be, an indication of one aspect of life that can only be appreciated with its opposite, heaven with earth, the bitter with the sweet; it is only we who are not in tune with nature and the harmonious oppositions of the Dao, the Way.

You will probably think that our Zen practice resembles more of the Taoist point of view than the Buddhist. And you’d be right. Because we actually follow a Fourth Teaching, the Way of Zen, which is both like and unlike the other three.

When Bodhidharma brought Buddhism from India to China, he brought the transcendent meditation of Indian dhyana, where it met the indigenous Taoist meditation called “the art of sitting and forgetting.” And thus we have the progression of dhyana to Chan to Zen. We often simplify all this to say that when Bodhidharma came to China, Buddhism was married with Taoism, and thus was born Zen. Better to say maybe that Taoism adopted Buddhism, which is why we see in some paintings Confucius handing over a baby Buddha to Lao Tzu to raise.

And when Buddhism reached maturity in China, it became embodied in Bodhidharma as Chan or Zen. The fierce Bodhidharma of Zen is something very different than from the serene Shakyamuni of Indian Buddhism. 

Bodhidharma, then, might be regarded as the Fourth Sage and Zen as the Fourth Teaching, since it differs from the other teachings but is in the same family. 

Some people think we--here in this dojo, this temple--rely too much on ritual and tradition, like the Confucianist: that our ceremonies smack of ritualistic Catholicism, too rigid, too much bowing, incense and nonsense. Others, of course, would say that we stray too much from the Ancient rituals and aren’t rigid enough. I think we keep a balance. We haven’t thrown out ritual and tradition, but we don’t worship it as the be all and end all. 

Some people would say that we are not really Buddhists, or not very good Buddhists because we don’t pray or chant enough; we don’t preach veganism or vegetarianism; we don’t necessarily believe in reincarnation or karma or the interconnectedness of all things or impermanence or anything else, for that matter. 

We don’t grimace and sneer and boohoo at the vinegar of life, but use it in our salad dressing. 

Some people would say we are more like Taoists, seeing harmony in all things, but we aren’t very good Taoists either because we don’t levitate or practice magic, or believe in the “elixirs” of immortality.

No doubt, Deshimaru’s Zen--at least as we practice it--is often more Taoist than Buddhist, more Buddhist than Confucian. But we are even more Western than that. Nontheistic. Humanistic. We even believe in science! When push comes to shove, and religious dogma is questioned by science, science has to win.

Because, to return to the Daxue, we emphasize equally “investigating things” and “sincerity of will.”

This is why it is most clarifying to see Four Sages, Four Teachers, with Bodhidharma on the same level as Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Shakyamuni. 

Deshimaru is often called the Modern Bodhidharma. Just as Bodhidharma brought Zen from the West to China, Deshimaru brought Zen to the West, to France. His Zen is our Zen, neither Indian nor Chinese, neither Japanese nor Western. The practice of compassionate wisdom goes beyond any of these cultural reactions to the bitterness of life. This must be the basis of our own Great Learning. 

— Richard Collins

Zazen Is Not a Sensory Deprivation Chamber

In his “Universally Recommended Instructions for Practicing Zazen,” the Fukanzazengi, Dogen tells us to seek out a quiet place. A quiet place; not a silent place. Zazen is not a sensory deprivation chamber.

We practice with all of our senses intact. This is one way we know we are alive, one of the five skandhas. We are not aiming to put ourselves in a trance. We are only locating ourselves in the here and now.

Yes, we soften the sensory inputs. We find a quiet place. We turn the lights down low, neither too bright nor too dark, so that we are neither distracted nor tempted to fall asleep. We keep our eyes half closed, neither wide open nor squeezed shut. We avoid extremes of temperature, so that we don’t shiver from cold or sweat from heat. We burn incense to flatten the smells in the room. We neither fast nor overeat, so that our stomachs don’t growl at us or others.

But it is sound that often disturbs people most of all. 

When I first started doing zazen, even before I started going to the temple on Camp Street, I would sit among the rafters of our creole cottage at the corner of Dauphine and St. Roch in the Faubourg Marigny. Right outside my window, the Desire bus would stop to drop or to pick up passengers. It was very noisy, but it was the quietest place in the house. For a while I would imagine that I would pack up my thoughts, like unruly school children, into the bus, and it would take them to the Desire projects down the road. Soon I didn’t hear the bus anymore, or at least it didn’t bother me.

That’s how we should treat distractions. Note them, give them a meaning if you must, and send them away.

At the temple, where the dojo was fairly well isolated from the streets, there would still be other sounds. The bells of St Patrick’s Church. The crows on the roof. The sirens on the street. 

When we moved to Royal Street for a while, I once found one of our more zealous members meditating in the closet. To escape the noise, I suppose, since he had the whole dojo to himself. (By the way, zealotry is not Zen.) The bodhisattva doesn’t isolate himself or herself from the world. He would have done better to do zazen in the park or on a bus.

Today, here in the Napoleon dojo, we have had coughing and sneezing, clearing of throats, cracking of knees, traffic outside, the hot water heater sighing behind the walls, the dog barking upstairs. The noise of the others in the dojo means we are not practicing alone. The traffic is taking others to work; be thankful that it’s not you who has to go to work right now. The dog barking means she’s saying hello to other dogs passing on the street; she’s not trying to disturb your concentration. Remember: it’s not about you. Neither the traffic nor the dog’s hello is directed at you.

But our discriminating minds tell us one sound is good and another is bad, one sound soothes us and another disturbs us. There is not much difference between the sweep of a car on the street and the soughing of the wind in the trees. But we are quick to say, “traffic bad, wind in trees good.” During zazen we drop these distinctions. 

At the Alexandria dojo, we had one woman who was very sensitive to the sound of the ticking clock on the wall. We finally had to remove the clock. It was either the clock or her. One of them had to go. But if it was not the clock, it would have been something else. 

The opening lines of the Shinjinmei tell us, just don’t choose! Once you start choosing, having preferences, putting clocks out of the room, it never stops. There will always be something to make us unhappy. The clock will drive you crazy. The dog will drive you crazy. Your own breathing will drive you crazy. My voice giving this kusen will drive you crazy. If it’s not one thing, it will be another. Just don’t choose.

— Richard Collins