October 11, 2023
Eclipsed moon, by Martin Adams
Dear Practice Period Participants,
How is the practice engagement of non-duality going for you? How/ where/when/why do you find it showing up in your life? What does it look like when it does?
This week, we will continue to turn the Genjo Koan together as a support for the practice engagement of non-duality by looking at the next few sentences of the translation. Even though it’s only a few sentences, there is, like last week, a lot packed into each phrase. This may be a good week, again to see if one phrase or image stands out to you to work with throughout the week.
Here’s this week’s section:
To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening. Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings. Further, there are those who continue realizing beyond realization, who are in delusion throughout delusion. When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing buddhas.
When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly. Unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illuminated the other side is dark.
To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.
Dogen starts this passage by differentiating delusion and awakening as two modes of relationality. One mode is delusion: carrying around a self that does not change as we go from place to place, from interaction to interaction, context to context, from moment to moment. The other mode is awakening: our being arriving with all things that are also arriving and becoming, moment after moment. In this second mode, there is a self, but it’s a self that is willing to be created and co-create the world as it’s arising around us.
Those who have great realization of delusion are buddhas; those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings.
We particularly love “Buddhas have great realization of delusion” as a wondrous, bottomless teaching. Instead of trying to get away from, or get rid of delusions, Dogen encourages us to really get into them! Enlightening beings are ones who are deeply familiar and intimate, “have great realization” and understanding of delusions. This is why, in this practice period where we are engaging with non-duality, we keep offering the practice of having a close look at how dualities work for each of us. Not to wallow in, or to even believe our dualities and delusions, but to have faith that turning toward them may be more liberatory than trying to get rid of them or think they shouldn’t be there, or that they are somehow in the way of freedom.
We hear “Buddhas have great realization of delusion” as the encouragement to study the ways each one of us gets pulled back into the swirl of suffering, and really studying and becoming intimate with how this works for us. Maybe eventually we can even become so familiar that, sometimes, we can see the delusions coming, brace ourselves for the whirlpool of delusions that are starting to form, and swim out a bit from the swirling to get a wider view.
Then, “those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings,” offers a different encouragement to not grasp any ideas or theories about realization or awakening. Whatever I think realization is, if I land in a fixed idea that isn’t arising in flux with all things, I’m falling back into delusion. Whatever I think awakening, freedom and zazen are, if I grasp those ideas, I’m back in delusion, because whatever I grasp slips back into duality. As soon as realization, awakening, freedom, zazen and nonduality are this (whatever this may be), and not that (whatever that may be), I have missed the dynamic, vital life unfolding in complexity right Here. In our practice in Soto Zen, awakening is not a fixed thing we are aiming at. Genjo Koan opens awakening as an unfixed dimension of possibility alive right here. And what we bring to it, the quality of our love, inquiry and presence, feeds awakening as a field of possibility. Because awakening is not fixed, awakening can be actualized where I am, with whatever I’m doing.
Further, there are those who continue realizing beyond realization, who are in delusion throughout delusion
“Realizing beyond realization” may recall the expression from last week’s passage, “Leaping clear of the many and the one….” This is not about transcendence, but the dynamism of realizational practice, which does not abide in yesterday’s insight, but is arising, right now, with all things.
When buddhas are truly buddhas they do not necessarily notice that they are buddhas. However, they are actualized buddhas, who go on actualizing buddhas.
Buddhas actualize buddhas. Awakening studies, actualizes and manifests awakening. Wholeheartedness inquires into and realizes wholeheartedness. Zazen investigates, unfolds, actualizes and leaps beyond zazen.
When you see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly. Unlike things and their reflections in the mirror, and unlike the moon and its reflection in the water, when one side is illuminated the other side is dark.
What does it mean for you: to see forms or hear sounds fully engaging body-and-mind, you grasp things directly? Instead of saying more about this, we encourage you to engage this in an embodied way.
And then there are the images of darkness and light- when one side is illuminated, the other side is dark. The sense of this image is one that is used often and is also contested in Soto Zen. It can be understood as pointing to the radical intimacy of non-duality: when I hear a bird call, it is not me in here hearing a sound of an animal “out there,” but the whole event arising together. The bird, sound, hearing and me are one event. We can analyze this experience into parts: bird and person, song and hearing; and when we do, the parts look separate, but the parts only make sense as non-separate parts of one wholeness arising. When hearing is illuminated, it includes the bird, and there is no bird “out there.” When the bird is illuminated, it includes our hearing. There is no hearing in us apart from the bird, and in truth no song of the bird apart from our hearing coming forth to experience themselves.
In another Zen text, the Sandokai*, or “The Harmony of Difference and Sameness,” it says,
In the light there is darkness,
but don’t take it as darkness;
In the dark there is light,
but don’t see it as light.
Light and dark oppose one another
like the front foot and back foot in walking.
Light embodies the wisdom of differentiation while darkness embodies the wisdom of non-differentiation. Light sees parts, hearing, the sound and the bird. Darkness appreciates that it is all one event. In the light, we are seeing particulars, and honoring that they are real and true. In the darkness, we are attuning to all things arising in interdependence, and honoring that this is also true. These vantage points are in harmony and naturally turn on each other, and together make our path toward awakening. So in walking, in order to move forward on the path, we keep alternating, right foot forward, left back, then left foot forward, right foot back. If we stop on one foot, we don’t move forward, and each step is “leaping beyond,” “realizing beyond realization.”
Breath is also offering us this teaching all the time. We breathe in and out, it’s a natural dynamic that together make up breathing. We don’t seek out the ultimate in-breath or the ultimate out-breath, we don’t abide in one or the other. We don’t uphold breathing in as higher or lower, better or worse, than breathing out.
So in terms of actually practicing with what Dogen is offering us here, we could consider: one step a Buddha, one step a sentient being. One step particular being, one step myriad things, back and forth. Breathing in we sit still, breathing out we move through many activities.
So for you, today: how is it to walk and breathe and see the world through these back-and-forth eyes like this?
How is to fully engage body-and-mind, when one side is illuminated the other side is dark?
Looking forward to hearing,
Charlie & Sarah
—
Zen Priest, Dharma Teachers
Resources:* If you’d like to delve into the darkness and light imagery more, you can check out Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s talk on Sandokai published in Lion’s Roar online magazine