Going beyond the boundary of all things is important. It is wisdom, which is the basis of compassion. Only when we identify ourselves with others can we genuinely act with love toward others. At the same time, however, for practical and ethical reasons in our daily activities, we need to maintain the boundaries of self and other. An enlightened person is someone who embodies the deep understanding of nonduality while acting in accordance with ordinary boundaries, not being bound to either realm but acting freely and harmoniously.45
IRONY OF AUTHENTICITY
“Self-realization without a teacher” is seen as a cause of self-righteousness and arrogance, and thus is traditionally discouraged in Zen. Dogen, however, is free and radical enough to say that studying dharma with a sutra or a teacher is none other than self-realization without a teacher.46 As everyone has a different background, character, and situation, one has to arrive at one’s own realization. On the other hand, Dogen is orthodox enough to say that realization without a teacher is to study with the teacher and to study with a scripture.
The single point Dogen repeatedly brings out throughout his teaching career is authenticity. He describes himself as one who has authentically received transmission of the true dharma from his teacher, Rujing.47 All of the effort in his writings is directed toward understanding, enlivening, expounding, and transmitting what he sees as the authentic teaching of the Buddha.48 Dogen sometimes uses the words “authentic” and “authentically” several times in one sentence!
The main sources of his inspiration, other than Rujing’s words, are Indian Buddhist scriptures and Chinese Zen texts. Dogen draws stories, sayings, verses, and guidelines from these texts to authenticate the practice of the way he is engaged in. Dogen’s words “longing for the ancient” well reflect his admiration of and dedication to the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha and the subsequent dharma descendants up to Rujing.49
Some of the earlier Zen practitioners in China were eccentric and wild-spirited, and did not live in monasteries. Dogen draws teachings from their examples, but he himself chooses to follow the tradition of thorough and solemn daily monastic practice. He regards all daily activities, including wearing the robe, cooking, and engaging in administrative work, as sacred. Dogen orchestrates the whole monastic life in ceremonial patterns, highly choreographing every movement—when and how to enter the meditation hall, how to bow, how to sit down, how to eat, and even how to use the toilet.50
His operating principle is based on guidelines from Chinese Zen monasteries. The seating and movements are organized hierarchically around the abbot as the supreme authority. The status of monastery officers and the dharma ages (years from the time of ordination) of monks are next in line. Geographically, north is regarded as higher than south and the left side as higher than the right side. Perhaps this reflects a combination of ancient Indian custom and the Chinese imperial court system. Everyone in the monastic community is expected to follow the guidelines exactly.51 By participating in a well-established communal environment, he seems to believe, practitioners can mature their spirituality with little chance to create unwholesome actions.52
Being authentic for Dogen means being true not only to the tradition, but to the particularity of each person’s experience, which is intuitive and fresh. This may explain why Zen practitioners have produced enormous amounts of literature. The emphasis on spontaneity and individual creativity may explain why Dogen himself produced a unique and extensive body of writing.
It is striking to note that Dogen’s obsession with strict monastic guidelines does not confine him in his imaginative and thought-provoking expressions. Rather, his highly patterned daily life becomes the basis for the unprecedented degree of freedom in his use of language. For him, the realm of unbounded imagination derives from reality itself—brought about only by authentic practice.
DOGEN’S STYLE OF WRITING
Dogen was one of the first Buddhist teachers to write in Japanese. (Until then, Japanese students of Buddhism commonly read and wrote in Chinese, which was pronounced in a Japanese approximation of Chinese pronunciation.) He wrote the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye in medieval Japanese, although he retained ancient and medieval Chinese forms when quoting from Zen and secular Chinese texts, as well as Buddhist sutras. While some of his poetry was composed in Japanese, Dogen wrote all official statements, most of the monastic guidelines, and many of his poems in Chinese.
The Chinese language has thousands of ideographs and is rich in expressing poetic images and philosophical concepts. Meanwhile, it has no grammatical conjugations and lacks definite parts of speech. The relationship between words is often implicit. Thus, its sentence structure is suggestive and ambiguous.
The Japanese writing system combines Chinese ideographs and Japanese phonetic letters. Its grammar has inflections and parts of speech, so sentence structure is usually explicit. The logical structure of the Japanese language thus allowed Dogen to pioneer a genre of immensely critical essays in his own language.
When Dogen takes up Chinese texts and makes his own translations, he sometimes stretches the original meanings. Part of the poetry and surprise of Dogen’s thinking is characterized by this stretching. For example, a line of Rujing’s poetry can normally be translated as “Plum blossoms open in early spring.” Dogen translates it as “Plum blossoms open early spring.” Also, a line from the Great Pari-nirvana Sutra is traditionally translated as “All have buddha nature.” He translates it as “All beings are buddha nature.”
At times Dogen also breaks down a Chinese line into individual ideographs and rearranges the sequence. For example: “The mind itself is buddha,” “The mind is buddha itself,” “Buddha is itself the mind,” “The mind itself buddha is,” “Buddha is the mind itself.”53
A fascicle of the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye often starts with a summary paragraph in Dogen’s own tempered sentences, giving the topic an ultimate value. When he talks about the monastic robe, for example, he describes it as the most essential thing in Buddhist practice. In the same manner, all monastic activities, as well as scriptures, ancestors, and dharma transmission, are given absolute values.
Then, he quotes from Buddhist scriptures, Zen dialogues, or Zen poems and comments on each line, making a detailed examination of the meaning behind the words. He does not hesitate to harshly criticize great masters like Linji and Yunmen, while admiring their teachings in other passages. At the same time, he reveres the accounts of the earliest Chinese masters, such as Bodhidharma and Huineng, the Sixth Ancestor, as well as later ancestors of his lineage.
Dogen focuses on theoretical aspects of the teaching, while constantly reminding students that awakening is beyond thinking. In some of his essays and monastic guidelines, he gives detailed instructions on the practical aspects of zazen and communal activities, often mixed with philosophical interpretations and poetic expressions.
Commenting on earlier Zen masters’ words, Dogen develops his own thought and finds a way to expand the meaning of their words to elaborate his understanding of the utmost importance of each moment. A remarkable example of this is his interpretation of a verse by Yaoshan (ninth-tenth century): “For the time being, stand on a high mountain . . .” From this, Dogen develops his thought that time is no other than being—the concept of “time being,” which I alluded to previously.
The Chinese Zen literature contains a number of stories in which teachers of scriptures abandon lecturing in favor of practicing Zen, or in which Zen teachers make comments that appear to question the primacy of the scriptures. Actually, it is not common for Zen teachers to make extensive efforts to examine the meanings of scriptural phrases. It seems that Chinese Zen marked a distinct departure from the Mahayana texts that embody splendorous cosmic mythology and highly systematic theories. Instead, Chinese Zen leaders focused on a practitioner’s experience of the very moment in each individual situation. They tended to point to concrete daily objects such as sandals, a whisk, or a walking stick. Parts of the body—top o
f the head, eyeballs, nostrils, fists, and heels—were their favorite points of reference.
Dogen speaks such Zen language as this. At the same time, however, he conducts a thorough investigation of phrases from a number of sutras, which makes him unique as a Zen teacher. His writings in the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye provide a synthesis of these two traditional aspects: studies of scripture that contain vast systematic expressions of the Buddhist teaching, and Zen, which emphasizes direct experience of the essence of Buddhist teaching through meditation.
Most of the texts in the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye were delivered to Dogen’s practicing community. He may have read the text aloud (as opposed to speaking spontaneously from a rough note) but there is no evidence that he received questions. His main audience consisted of resident monks, and possibly some senior nuns who were his students. Laypeople such as donors and laborers who happened to be working on the monastery construction were at times invited. He also had an invisible audience of heavenly beings, and sometimes describes dharma teachers as “guiding masters of humans and devas.”
It is clear that Dogen’s thinking and understanding deepened as he wrote his essays. He made a careful revision of his texts with the help of Ejo, his senior student and successor-to-be. Either Dogen or Ejo made final clean copies of the manuscripts.
DECODING THE ZEN PARADOX
Dogen’s writings are known for their impenetrability. Zen practitioners who study the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye say that it often takes years to understand some passages in the text. The difficulty of his writings comes from the depth of Buddhist thinking in general and the use of Zen stories or words that are enigmatic, plus his own idiosyncratic style of writing.
In exploring the deeper meanings of Zen stories, poetry, teachings, and Buddhist sutras, Dogen expands, twists, and manipulates the meanings of the words from the texts he quotes.54 By presenting unique and at times outrageous interpretations, he unleashes a great variety of descriptions on the state of meditation.
Dogen makes use of a full range of Zen rhetoric on the paradox of awakening beyond thought. The traditional teaching device includes nonverbal expressions such as silence, shouting, beating, and gestures, which have been recorded in words. Sacrilegious or violent words and absurd images that are intended to crush stereotypical thinking are not uncommon in Zen heritage. Opposite answers to the same question may be given, and different questions may be responded to with the same answer.
Here are examples of other types of Zen rhetoric that Dogen adopts and employs:
1. Startling images: “There is [a mountain] walking, there is [a mountain] flowing, and there is a moment when a mountain gives birth to a mountain child.”55
2. Upside-down language: “The forest runs around the hunting dog.”56
3. Tautology: “A fish swims like a fish. . . . A bird flies like a bird.”57
4. Negative tautology: “An ancient buddha said, ‘Mountains are mountains, waters are waters.’ These words do not mean mountains are mountains; they mean mountains are mountains.”58
5. Chopped logic: “At the very moment of asking the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from India, this dharma wheel is nothing is essential. Nothing is essential doesn’t mean not to utilize or break this dharma wheel. This dharma wheel turns in nothing is essential.”59
6. Contradiction: “We manifest the voice of insentient beings speaking dharma with the eyes. Investigate the eyes extensively. Because the voice heard by the eyes should be the same as the voice heard by the ears, the voice heard by the eyes is not the same as the voice heard by the ears.”60
7. The same word with contrasting meanings: “To study the self [selfless universal self] is to forget the self [ego]. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.”61
8. Opposite uses of the same metaphor: (a) “When Bodhidharma came from India, the root of twining vines [entanglement with letters and theories] was immediately cut off and the pure, single buddha dharma spread. Hope that it will be like this in our country.”62 (b) “‘Teacher and disciple practice mutually’ is twining vines [intimate interactions] of buddha ancestors.”63
9. Reversed statement: “An ancient buddha said, ‘A painting of a rice cake does not satisfy hunger.’ . . . there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake.”64
10. Non sequitur: “Zhaozhou . . . was once asked by a monk, ‘I heard that you personally saw Nanquan. Is it true?’ Zhaozhou said, ‘A giant radish was here in Zhen Region.’”65
11. One equals half: “Since intimacy surrounds you, it is fully intimate, half intimate.”66
12. One equals many: “When even one single thing is serene, myriad things are serene.”67
13. Seemingly mundane talk: “Zhaozhou, Great Master Zhenji, asked a newly arrived monk, ‘Have you been here before?’ The monk said, ‘Yes, I have been here.’ Zhaozhou said, ‘Have some tea.’”68
These modes of absurdity, contradiction, and double meaning are partly East Asian but mostly Zen, where there is inherent distrust in conventional language and logic. Dogen often makes an effort to crush and penetrate normal intellectual views, going directly to the source of consciousness that is reality itself, before reasoning in duality and nonduality arise. He sometimes calls this mode of communication “intimate language” or “true expression.” It is a realm of word beyond word and logic beyond logic.
IMAGE OF TRANSCENDENCE
Awakening starts with the recognition that there are those who are awakened and those who are not. Once awakened, you are free from the distinction between them. This freedom is transcended to the point that there are those who are awakened and those who are not, which appears similar to the beginning stage. On this advanced level of freedom, however, you are totally yourself and act without hindrance.
Thus, there are: affirmation, negation, negation of negation, and negation of “negation of negation.” This direction toward the next level of experience can be characterized as: duality, nonduality that is transcendence of duality, transcendence of transcendence, and transcended activities.
This may be seen as a map of freedom, an intellectual analysis. But, in fact, this kind of transcendence is experienced freely and intuitively. Let us examine some of the terms Dogen employs to demonstrate an immediate experience:
“Dropping away body and mind,” “casting off limitations,” and “hurling away enlightenment” are some of the basic images of release from restricted self-experience. That means you “set aside” usual concerns and are “detached” from both awakening and not awakening.
While you “give up holding back,” you are not motionless. Rather, you “break away” and take “the path of letting go.” You “leap out,” “leap over,” and “leap clear.” You “jump,” “fly beyond,” and “leap beyond ancient and present.” In Chinese and Japanese, transcending is described as “going beyond” (as in “going beyond buddhas”), which indicates the direction of “going upward,” “surpassing” buddhas and ancestors.
The act of “inquiring beyond” and “expressing beyond” is none other than “breaking through the bamboo node [intellect and theories]” and “going beyond discriminatory thoughts” by “breaking open,” “penetrating,” and “passing through the barrier of dualism.” Being “free and transparent” may be possible by “cutting through,” “cutting apart,” “cutting to the original,” “crushing,” “smashing,” and “vanishing.” This is sometimes represented by such graphic expressions as “cracking open particles” and “plucking out eyeballs.”
When all preconceived notions of goals and objectives are “lost,” you “float free” and “let myriad things advance themselves.” That is the “realm of the unconstructed,” “beyond knowing,” and “beyond thinking.” Here, there is “no effort” and “no creation.”
This place of “no doing” is not being lazy or idly thinking about freedom. Instead, it is an experience “beyond obstruction” for the purpose of “thorough understan
ding,” “fully actualizing,” “realizing through the body,” and the “embodiment” of “directly clarifying the source beyond words.” It is not separate from each moment of “sitting through” and “cutting through sitting.”
THE TIME WHEN DOGEN LIVED
In Japanese history, the era when Dogen lived is called the Kamakura Period (1185–1333). The preceding periods are the Asuka Period (593–710), the Nara Period (710–794), and the Heian Period (794–1185).
Buddhist doctrine was introduced to Japan through Chinese-language texts from Korea in the mid-sixth century. Since Buddhism was accompanied by the writing system and advanced technology of a great civilization, it quickly received imperial patronage and spread throughout the country. The appointment of Prince Shotoku as the regent, who was to dedicate his life to the practice and propagation of Buddhism, marked the beginning of the Asuka Period.
The grid-shaped city planning of Nara, the new capital of Japan, followed that of the Chinese capital city Chan’an. The construction of the Todai Temple, which housed an enormous Buddha statue, exemplified a concerted national effort initiated by the monarch to create a society based on the infinite luminosity of the universal buddha light described in the Avatamsaka Sutra. The six schools of Buddhism, most of which were based on various philosophical principles, flourished.
A larger-scale planned city of Heian (Kyoto), to the north of Nara, became the imperial capital, where a highly refined court culture developed. Trade with China increased, and a number of monks studied in Tang China, a flourishing world empire. The Shingon (mantra) School, focused on highly ritualized Esoteric Buddhist prayers, became one of the two most influential schools of Buddhism in Japan. The Tendai School—the Japanese form of the Tiantai School in China—was the other powerful school, with a comprehensive Buddhist training center on Mount Hiei in the northeast of Kyoto.
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