A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

Although Dogen is known for his philosophical thinking, he was quite prepared to preach more practical and homely sermons to his pupils. In his teaching years, he would often quote popular Chinese proverbs and expand upon them to illustrate Zen principles. For instance: “A man can only become the head of a house if he becomes deaf and dumb.” Dogen puts this in a Zen context by pointing out that we cannot complete our allotted task unless we ignore the tittle-tattle of others and refrain from being critical about their shortcomings. Here we are into the Buddhist precepts, and the master stresses how difficult these are to observe in practice. Only those who have penetrated to the bones and marrow of Zen, he says, are capable of this.

On Zen attitudes, he would warn that students must be like someone who has borrowed an enormous sum of money and is now expected to pay it back, but has nothing to give. With this frame of mind, said Dogen, it is an easy matter to gain enlightenment.

On another occasion, he quotes a famous Zen verse: “To achieve the Way is not difficult; just reject discrimination.” By rejecting the discriminating (little) mind, the student at once awakens. He must cast aside both body and mind and all the prejudgements of his conditioned past, and he will attain immediate awakening.

Although he was the founder of Soto in Japan, supposedly a “gradualist” path, here we see Dogen standing in the tradition of sudden and immediate enlightenment. A modern Soto master, Shunryu Suzuki, makes a similar point about Dogen’s stream of Zen:

“Our unexciting way of practice may appear to be very negative. This is not so …It is just very plain … it may seem as if I am speaking about gradual attainment. This is not so either. In fact, this is the sudden way, because when your practice is calm and ordinary, everyday life itself is enlightenment.”

One of the basic insights the candidate must have is that prized material possessions can often become enemies that bring harm instead of pleasure. Dogen tells this story about a common man who had a beautiful wife:

The lord of the manor demanded that he give her up to him, but he refused. When the lord surrounded his house with soldiers, the man said to his wife: “because of you I lose my life.” But the wife had other ideas, and before she threw herself from the top floor of the house, she said: ”because of you, I am losing mine.”

Once you have made the commitment to Zen, said the master, forget all about yourself. Simply practise what you are taught and do not allow yourself to become caught up in personal matters. If your mind does not desire anything, you will find absolute peace. Although here speaking to monks, the message is clear: unless you determinedly reject personal concerns (little mind), you will labour long on the road to enlightenment.

For laymen, Dogen has this to say: “there are those who never have associated with others and have grown up only in their own homes.” They behave, says the master, like tyrants, oblivious of what others think, or of their own spiritual condition. A Buddhist, on the other hand, should not set up his own views; he should work with other Buddhists and forget his little mind, dwelling at all times in big mind (the unborn).

A good Buddhist understands poverty. He at once casts aside his possessions, fame, fortune, and never curries the favour of anyone. He is his own man, and yet beyond being his own man. The world at large may not understand, but that does not matter. Such a man sells gold, but there is no-one to buy it. It is freely offered but nobody accepts it because what is free and available is at once suspect.

In terms of technique, Dogen would recommend the Eight Awarenesses and the Four Integrative Methods of Bodhisattvas. The Eight Awarenesses are:

1. Rejecting desire. Those who have many desires are always seeking to gain, and therefore have many afflictions.
2. Being content with things as they are. To be content, said the Buddha, “is the abode of prosperity and happiness, peace and tranquillity”.
3. Seeking solitude. Solitude is not necessarily the same as being alone. One can be in solitude in a big city. It all depends on one’s frame of mind. Big mind is quietude, solitude; small mind is the turmoil of the world.
4. Being diligent. To persevere without turning back on the path to enlightenment makes everything easy.
5. Maintaining mindfulness. The best companion, the Buddha said, is unfailing recollection. Awareness of Self and the teachings is the Royal Road of the Buddhas.
6. Cultivating concentration. This leads to a state of stability and an insight into the nature of rising and ceasing phenomena.
7. Seeking wisdom. The wisdom of learning, thinking and application makes a Man of the Way.
8. Desisting from idle chatter. Vain talk disturbs the mind and leads away from liberation.

Each of these eight awarenesses contains the others, making sixty-four in all. Students should single-mindedly follow the Way, aware that all things are unstable and subject to disintegration.

The Four Integrative Methods of Bodhisattvas are:

1. Giving. This means not being greedy or coveting anything. It also means not flattering, which is just another way of coveting.
2. Maintaining kind speech. This is the absence of harsh speech, one of the Buddhist precepts. When one knows that all beings and objects are the Buddha, kind speech is the most appropriate way of speaking.
3. Acting beneficially. This means employing the skilful means of the Bodhisattva for the benefit of all beings.
4. Co-operating. Co-operation, by not opposing, means knowing that oneself and others are one suchness. Just as “the ocean does not refuse water”, so one co-operates by knowing all as Self.

These four methods show how an enlightening being should operate in the world, unselfishly and, as Dogen puts it, “facing everyone with a mild countenance”.

Now Read Part 4

A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

Dogen was born in the year 1200 to an aristocratic family from Kyoto, the capital of Imperial Japan. When his mother died, he was adopted by the Regent. It was certain that he could look forward to a bright future at Court. Consequently, he was given the wide-ranging education necessary for a nobleman, and acquired many of the worldly skills of a high-ranking gentleman.

At the age of thirteen, however, some inner prompting forced him to abandon his political connections and seek the protection of an uncle who was an influential figure in the Buddhist Tendai school. A year later he was ordained and learning the syncretic and socially-aware doctines practised by this school.

That Dogen was not totally convinced by the Tendai teachings is borne out by the fact that within a year he was consulting Eisai, the Zen master who had introduced the Rinzai school into Japan. It is also said that he was pointed in the direction of Zen by a Tendai priest, no doubt spotting an incipient impatience with the school’s more elaborate doctrines and rites.

It says much for the basic unity of the Buddhist schools in Japan at that time that he continued to study Tendai contemplation methods, even after he had become formally associated with Rinzai Zen. In his later teaching phase, however, Dogen was to drop the rituals of esotericism from his own school of Zen. He described his early training and its set-backs in a lecture to an assembly of his student monks:

When I was quite young, the realization of the
transiency of this world stirred the mind towards
seeking the Way. After leaving Mt. Hiel, I visited
many temples during my practice of the Way, but until
I arrived at Kenninji I had yet to meet a real
teacher or a good friend. I was deluded and filled
with erroneous thoughts. The teachers I had seen
had advised me to study until I could be as learned
as those who had preceded me. I was told to make
myself known to the state and to gain fame in the
world…But on opening (books of biographies) and
on learning about the great priests and Buddhists
of China, I could see that their approach differed
from those of my teachers…By even thinking about
fame, I would be disgracing the old men of wisdom
and the men of good will to come, while earning a fine
name among inferior persons of this period. If I
wanted to emulate someone, it should be the former
sages and eminent priests of China and India,
rather than those of Japan…My physical and
mental makeup changed completely.

After Eisai’s death, he continued his connection with the Zen school through Myozen, the master’s successor, and finally became his disciple some three years later, at the age of eighteen. Such was his talent and application that, at twenty-one, Dogen was recognized as Myozen’s successor in the Oryu branch of the Rinzai Zen school.

There followed a visit to China, at that period the land of the Holy Grail, with his master, Myozen. It seems though that they were rather restricted by the political conditions then prevailing and could not travel much outside the Eastern part of the Empire. It is possible that this did not weigh too heavily on Dogen as he soon realized he had nothing to learn from any of the Zen masters there. It was a classic case of the pupil outstripping the teachers. He decided to return to Kyoto.

In the end he was persuaded to see one more master, Nyojo, and found his final teacher, staying on in his monastery for two years. His enlightenment came during this period of study and intensive meditation. Given his early preoccupation with words, it is perhaps not surprising that the trigger for his realisation came in the form of a rebuke by Nyojo to a sleeping monk.

“The study of Zen requires the shedding of body and mind.”

At this Dogen achieved great enlightenment. In his twenty-eighth year he returned to Japan having “completed his life’s study”.

Now Read Part 3

A Life of Dogen by John M Evans. In the Zen Masters Series.

A later, highly significant master, whose name looms large in Zen history, is the aristocratic priest, Dogen (1200-1253), renowned for introducing the Soto Zen school into Japan, but whose greatest achievement, paradoxically, is in the realm of words, his monumental collection of essays, the Shobogenzo, or Treasury of the True Dharma Eye.

Dogen was an extremely well-read man and something of an infant prodigy. By the age of seven he had devoured the major Confucian classics, and by nine, the complex psychological literature of Southern Buddhism. Unlike the T’ang masters, who revelled in their anti-literacy, Dogen was more of a contemplative kind, a thinker who nevertheless transcended his own thought processes. He is perhaps an ideal example for Westerners, as against the poor and apparently illiterate Hui Neng whose early experiences can only be simulated nowadays in the Third World.

It was the death of Dogen’s mother when he was eight that precipitated his first interest in Buddhism. It is said that as he watched the smoke rising from the incense stick that burnt by the body, he felt directly the transience of all existence. His loneliness drew him towards seeking an explanation for this cruel evanescence, one that satisfied his deepest sense of being, not just a form of words.

Even then he must have been acquainted with the Buddhist notion of annica, impermanence, change. Now he had first-hand knowledge of the principle in his own life. Not surprisingly perhaps it was the phrase, “shedding body and mind”, which was an important catalyst in his realization at the age of twenty-eight. At the moment of his enlightenment Dogen exclaimed: “There is no body and no mind.”

According to a spiritual heir of Dogen, Soto master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (1905-1971): “all his being in that moment became a flashing into the vast phenomenal world, a flashing which included everything, which covered everything, and which had immense quality in it; all the phenomenal world was included within it, an absolute independent existence. That was his enlightenment.”

His experience was that he had shed body and mind, but still existed — as skylike mind. Suzuki continues: “Because you think you have body or mind, you have lonely feelings, but when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, you become very strong, and your existence becomes very meaningful.”

Suzuki Roshi, former Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, distinguishes between “little mind”, which is associated with body-mind, and “big mind”, which is everything: Buddha-mind, Buddha-nature. When, during enlightenment we align with big mind, little mind is seen to be just an expression of big mind; clouds scudding across a vast blue sky.

Dogen’s views on enlightenment are generally well-known and much quoted in the literature. Like many a good writer he had the knack of creating memorable phrases, and in this he has been well served by his translators.

“To study Buddhism is to study ourselves. To study ourselves is to forget ourselves.” That is, to forget little mind. And in similar vein: “When one leaves the Way to the Way, one attains the Way.” Or again, on the “unattainability” of attainment: ”to consider attaining such a thing, one must be such a person; already being such a person, why trouble about such a thing?” Here he is playing around with the notion of suchness, allowing it to penetrate into his phraseology with great exuberance.

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