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There are two primary manifestations in this world that are identified as “Buddhism” – one that is “established” (instituted) and one that is “transmitted” (revealed). The established version portrays Buddha nature as it has been established and developed by the intellect of the common human being. The transmitted Buddha Dharma is the vision of Buddha nature that has been transmitted by enlightened Buddhas and ancestors. From Dogen’s perspective, the established version of Buddhism is, of course, not Buddhism at all. Because ordinary beings are unable or unwilling to trust, practice, and verify their own identity with Buddha nature as portrayed by the expressions of Buddhas and ancestors, the established form of Buddhism continues to endure.
Do you know where the disease lies which keeps you learners from reaching true understanding? It lies where you have no faith in your Self. When faith in your Self is lacking you find yourself hurried by others in every possible way. At every encounter you are no longer your master: you are driven about by others this way or that.
All that is required is all at once to cease leaving your Self in search of something external. When this is done you will find your Self no different from the Buddha or the patriarch. Do you want to know who the Buddha or patriarch is? He is no other than the one who is, at this moment, right in front of me, listening to my talk on the Dharma. You have no faith in him and therefore you are in quest of someone else somewhere outside. And what will you find? Nothing but words and names, however excellent. You will never reach the moving spirit in the Buddha or patriarch.
The Zen Teachings of Linchi, Burton Watson
Why do people find it so difficult to accept the revealed Dharma transmitted by Buddhas and ancestors? To ask it another way, why do people reject, out of hand, the very notion that they are, as they are, Buddha? In short, people deny their own Buddhahood because of their attachment to abstract conceptual views – (consciously or not) people are unwilling to trust immediate experience more than the conclusions of abstract speculation. When Dogen says, “Buddhas are enlightened about delusion; ordinary beings are deluded about enlightenment,” he means, in part, that ordinary beings are attached to false notions about enlightenment. Like everything else, apart from actual experience in a particular place at a specific time, “enlightenment” is merely a concept. The taste of a pineapple may be described, but until an individual actually experiences that taste at a specific place-time, the taste of a pineapple is a mere idea for that individual – not a real dharma. Likewise for the “taste” (experience) of enlightenment; and while the idea or concept about the taste of a pineapple may actually have some fairly accurate qualities about it (due to the individual’s experience with other fruits), concepts about enlightenment are never even in the same ballpark as the actual experience.
When we perfectly realize it, while still as we are, we would never have thought previously that realization would be like this. Even though we had imagined it, it is not a realization that is compatible with that imagining.
Shōbōgenzō, Yui-butsu-yo-butsu, Gudo Nishijima & Mike Cross
This is hardly a new or radical teaching, Buddhist masters have been insistent on the need to grasp the true significance of this from the beginning of Zen history. For example, in an early Zen record attributed to Bodhidharma, the first ancestor of Zen in China, we read:
People who don’t see their nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are liars and fools. They fall into endless space. They’re like drunks. They can’t tell good from evil. If you intend to cultivate such a practice, you have to see your nature before you can put an end to rational thought. To attain enlightenment without seeing your nature is impossible.
Still others commit all sorts of evil deeds, claiming karma doesn’t exist. They erroneously maintain that since everything is empty, committing evil isn’t wrong. Such persons fall into a hell of endless darkness with no hope of release. Those who are wise hold no such conception.
The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, Red Pine
The Buddhas and ancestors advise beginning practitioners not to aim for “enlightenment” or aim “to become Buddha” in their pursuit of the Buddhist goal for good reason; those that have not yet experienced the reality of enlightenment cannot envision it – aiming for some conceptual notion of enlightenment can only lead in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, people have a tendency to ignore this constant refrain of Buddhist masters and aim for conceptions of enlightenment anyway. While not as ridiculous as “aiming” to have no goals at all – which is inane as well as futile – aiming for speculative concepts of “enlightenment” is ineffective and it can become a serious hindrance. Those that have yet to experience it typically concoct ideas about enlightenment as consisting of undifferentiated oneness, pure consciousness, undefiled goodness, and similar concepts equally impossible to envision or imagine.
Fellow believers, I tell you there is no Dharma to be found outside. But students don’t understand me and immediately start looking inward for some explanation, sitting by the wall in meditation, pressing their tongues against the roof of their mouths, absolutely still, never moving, supposing this to be the Dharma of the buddhas taught by the patriarchs. What a mistake! If you take this unmoving, clean, and pure environment to be the right way, then you will be making ignorance the lord and master. A man of old said, ‘Bottomless, inky black is the deep pit, truly a place to be feared!’ This is what he meant.
The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi, Burton Watson
Let go of emptiness and come back to the brambly forest.
Riding backward on the ox, drunken and singing,
Who could dislike the misty rain pattering on your bamboo raincoat and hat?
In the empty space you cannot stick a needle.
Cultivating the Empty Field, Dan Taigen Leighton
Intellectual conceptualization leads many to theorize that if there is any “bad,” “suffering,” “wrong,” etc. in human existence, it cannot have its source in Buddha nature, thus, it must arise from human weakness, imperfection, etc. Convinced of the “rationality” of such speculative theories, many practitioners unawares adopt dualistic presuppositions. If practitioners are ever to see beyond the ego-self, they must, at least tentatively, be willing to seriously consider the possible validity of the Buddhist teaching that all beings truly are, as they are, Buddha nature. As long as this is rejected, dismissed, minimized, or ignored there is no way to verify its truth in experiential realization. The need to see through deluded views that conceive of enlightenment in terms of abstract qualities like “goodness,” “purity,” etc., is one reason Zen masters sometimes utilize skillful means and turning words that appear to outsiders as shocking or irreverent.
A monk asked Joshu, “What is the pure land?”
Joshu said, “A puddle of piss.”
The monk asked, “Can you show it to me?”
Joshu said, “Don’t tempt me.”
...
Do you know where the disease lies which keeps you learners from reaching true understanding? It lies where you have no faith in your Self. When faith in your Self is lacking you find yourself hurried by others in every possible way. At every encounter you are no longer your master: you are driven about by others this way or that.
All that is required is all at once to cease leaving your Self in search of something external. When this is done you will find your Self no different from the Buddha or the patriarch. Do you want to know who the Buddha or patriarch is? He is no other than the one who is, at this moment, right in front of me, listening to my talk on the Dharma. You have no faith in him and therefore you are in quest of someone else somewhere outside. And what will you find? Nothing but words and names, however excellent. You will never reach the moving spirit in the Buddha or patriarch.
The Zen Teachings of Linchi, Burton Watson
Why do people find it so difficult to accept the revealed Dharma transmitted by Buddhas and ancestors? To ask it another way, why do people reject, out of hand, the very notion that they are, as they are, Buddha? In short, people deny their own Buddhahood because of their attachment to abstract conceptual views – (consciously or not) people are unwilling to trust immediate experience more than the conclusions of abstract speculation. When Dogen says, “Buddhas are enlightened about delusion; ordinary beings are deluded about enlightenment,” he means, in part, that ordinary beings are attached to false notions about enlightenment. Like everything else, apart from actual experience in a particular place at a specific time, “enlightenment” is merely a concept. The taste of a pineapple may be described, but until an individual actually experiences that taste at a specific place-time, the taste of a pineapple is a mere idea for that individual – not a real dharma. Likewise for the “taste” (experience) of enlightenment; and while the idea or concept about the taste of a pineapple may actually have some fairly accurate qualities about it (due to the individual’s experience with other fruits), concepts about enlightenment are never even in the same ballpark as the actual experience.
When we perfectly realize it, while still as we are, we would never have thought previously that realization would be like this. Even though we had imagined it, it is not a realization that is compatible with that imagining.
Shōbōgenzō, Yui-butsu-yo-butsu, Gudo Nishijima & Mike Cross
This is hardly a new or radical teaching, Buddhist masters have been insistent on the need to grasp the true significance of this from the beginning of Zen history. For example, in an early Zen record attributed to Bodhidharma, the first ancestor of Zen in China, we read:
People who don’t see their nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are liars and fools. They fall into endless space. They’re like drunks. They can’t tell good from evil. If you intend to cultivate such a practice, you have to see your nature before you can put an end to rational thought. To attain enlightenment without seeing your nature is impossible.
Still others commit all sorts of evil deeds, claiming karma doesn’t exist. They erroneously maintain that since everything is empty, committing evil isn’t wrong. Such persons fall into a hell of endless darkness with no hope of release. Those who are wise hold no such conception.
The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, Red Pine
The Buddhas and ancestors advise beginning practitioners not to aim for “enlightenment” or aim “to become Buddha” in their pursuit of the Buddhist goal for good reason; those that have not yet experienced the reality of enlightenment cannot envision it – aiming for some conceptual notion of enlightenment can only lead in the wrong direction. Nevertheless, people have a tendency to ignore this constant refrain of Buddhist masters and aim for conceptions of enlightenment anyway. While not as ridiculous as “aiming” to have no goals at all – which is inane as well as futile – aiming for speculative concepts of “enlightenment” is ineffective and it can become a serious hindrance. Those that have yet to experience it typically concoct ideas about enlightenment as consisting of undifferentiated oneness, pure consciousness, undefiled goodness, and similar concepts equally impossible to envision or imagine.
Fellow believers, I tell you there is no Dharma to be found outside. But students don’t understand me and immediately start looking inward for some explanation, sitting by the wall in meditation, pressing their tongues against the roof of their mouths, absolutely still, never moving, supposing this to be the Dharma of the buddhas taught by the patriarchs. What a mistake! If you take this unmoving, clean, and pure environment to be the right way, then you will be making ignorance the lord and master. A man of old said, ‘Bottomless, inky black is the deep pit, truly a place to be feared!’ This is what he meant.
The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi, Burton Watson
Let go of emptiness and come back to the brambly forest.
Riding backward on the ox, drunken and singing,
Who could dislike the misty rain pattering on your bamboo raincoat and hat?
In the empty space you cannot stick a needle.
Cultivating the Empty Field, Dan Taigen Leighton
Intellectual conceptualization leads many to theorize that if there is any “bad,” “suffering,” “wrong,” etc. in human existence, it cannot have its source in Buddha nature, thus, it must arise from human weakness, imperfection, etc. Convinced of the “rationality” of such speculative theories, many practitioners unawares adopt dualistic presuppositions. If practitioners are ever to see beyond the ego-self, they must, at least tentatively, be willing to seriously consider the possible validity of the Buddhist teaching that all beings truly are, as they are, Buddha nature. As long as this is rejected, dismissed, minimized, or ignored there is no way to verify its truth in experiential realization. The need to see through deluded views that conceive of enlightenment in terms of abstract qualities like “goodness,” “purity,” etc., is one reason Zen masters sometimes utilize skillful means and turning words that appear to outsiders as shocking or irreverent.
A monk asked Joshu, “What is the pure land?”
Joshu said, “A puddle of piss.”
The monk asked, “Can you show it to me?”
Joshu said, “Don’t tempt me.”
...
Joshu and a city official were walking together. A rabbit they happened across instantly darted off when it saw them. The official said, “You are a greatly enlightened being, why did the rabbit run for its life?”
Joshu said, “I like to kill.”
...
A monk asked Yunmen, “What is Buddha?”
Yunmen said, “A dry turd.”
...
Joshu said, “I like to kill.”
...
A monk asked Yunmen, “What is Buddha?”
Yunmen said, “A dry turd.”
...
All this is simply a Buddha, when doing His practice, wriggling His toes in His straw sandals. There are times when His singular way of putting the Matter will be the sound from His breaking wind or the smell from His emptying His bowels. Those with Nostrils will get a whiff of It.
Shōbōgenzō, Gyōbutsu Iigi, Hubert Nearman
...
Shōbōgenzō, Gyōbutsu Iigi, Hubert Nearman
...
A monk said, “In the day there is sunlight, at night there is firelight. What is ‘divine light’?”
The master said, “Sunlight, firelight.”
The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, James Green
...
The moment we actually succeed in ceasing such conceptualization the truth of “transmitted” (revealed) Buddhism and falsity of “established” (instituted) Buddhism becomes self-evident. The term “nirvana” literally means “extinction” and we can see by its etymology that one of its traditional meanings is “the end of the world.” Like the term “apocalypse” (Greek; “revelation”), the “end of the world” symbolized by the term nirvana informs us that along with “arising” and “abiding,” time possess the quality of “perishing.” Also like “apocalypse,” this sense of “nirvana” possesses the connotation of a “new beginning” or the actualization of a “new realm of reality” – a realm of perfection or eternal peace. This is the same image portrayed in the Zen expression about the “great death,” and the more usual term in Mahayana literature, “annutara samyak sambodhi” (full and perfect enlightenment). What all of these terms commonly convey is that the end (destruction, death, end, perishing, etc.) of the present world or life is simultaneously the beginning of a new world or life.
To experience an establishment or institution is to experience indirectly, to receive an interpretation or explanation; to experience a transmission or revelation is to experience directly, to perceive or sense immediately – establishments convey units of information (abstract ideas, concepts); transmissions reveal unified formations (dharmas; actual, particular instances of existence-time). The products of establishments are conveyed circuitously and discursively through hearing and learning; the products of transmission are revealed directly and wholly through seeing and perceiving. Transmission or revelation does not occur through faith or understanding, it does not require the acceptance of anything concealed or beyond human experience – to receive transmissions or revelations is to see “face to face.” This is the true significance of the Zen tradition of “mind to mind” or “face to face” transmission. The transmission of the Buddha Dharma is the transmission of enlightened wisdom (bodhi prajna) from the Buddha mind to the Buddha mind. Clear seeing is prajna itself; to see “face to face” is to see Shakyamuni face to face – not to see Shakyamuni face to face is not to see Shakyamuni at all.
By bowing down in respect to the Face of Shakyamuni Buddha and by transferring the Eye of Shakyamuni Buddha to our own eyes, we will have transferred our eyes to the Eye of Buddha. Ours will be the very Eye and Face of Buddha. Without even one generation’s break, that which has been conferred face-to-face right up to the present by the mutual Transmission of this Buddha Eye and Buddha Face is this very Face-to-Face Transmission.
…
Be very clear about it: when someone Transmits face-to-face the Treasure House of the Eye of the True Teaching by saying, “You have realized what my Marrow is,” this is plainly an instance of conferring the Face-to-Face Transmission. At that very moment when you let go of your everyday notions of what ‘bones and marrow’ means, there will be the Face-to-Face Transmission of the Buddhas and Ancestors. The Face-to-Face Transmission of the great Full Enlightenment and the Mind seal will involve a particular moment in a definite place.
Shobogenzo, Menju, Hubert Nearman
Clear seeing (prajna) is both the method (means) and goal (end) of Buddhist practice-realization. “Realization” (nirvana, full enlightenment) is the “great death,” the end of the present world, it is the transference of our ordinary, mundane eye, for the Dharma-Eye which sees clearly. “Practice” denotes the ceaseless, ongoing actualization of clear seeing which ever-advances the total exertion, casting off, total exertion, casting off that is the actualization of the universe (genjokoan). Zazen-only is the standard systematic skillful process through which the Buddha Dharma is accurately transmitted and revealed; Zazen-only is the function of “practice” and it is the essence of “realization.” The Buddhist sutras and ancestral records are the vehicle of Dharma Transmission, the body or form of the Buddhist expression of the unified vision of the “great matter of life and death.”
The master said, “Sunlight, firelight.”
The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, James Green
...
The moment we actually succeed in ceasing such conceptualization the truth of “transmitted” (revealed) Buddhism and falsity of “established” (instituted) Buddhism becomes self-evident. The term “nirvana” literally means “extinction” and we can see by its etymology that one of its traditional meanings is “the end of the world.” Like the term “apocalypse” (Greek; “revelation”), the “end of the world” symbolized by the term nirvana informs us that along with “arising” and “abiding,” time possess the quality of “perishing.” Also like “apocalypse,” this sense of “nirvana” possesses the connotation of a “new beginning” or the actualization of a “new realm of reality” – a realm of perfection or eternal peace. This is the same image portrayed in the Zen expression about the “great death,” and the more usual term in Mahayana literature, “annutara samyak sambodhi” (full and perfect enlightenment). What all of these terms commonly convey is that the end (destruction, death, end, perishing, etc.) of the present world or life is simultaneously the beginning of a new world or life.
To experience an establishment or institution is to experience indirectly, to receive an interpretation or explanation; to experience a transmission or revelation is to experience directly, to perceive or sense immediately – establishments convey units of information (abstract ideas, concepts); transmissions reveal unified formations (dharmas; actual, particular instances of existence-time). The products of establishments are conveyed circuitously and discursively through hearing and learning; the products of transmission are revealed directly and wholly through seeing and perceiving. Transmission or revelation does not occur through faith or understanding, it does not require the acceptance of anything concealed or beyond human experience – to receive transmissions or revelations is to see “face to face.” This is the true significance of the Zen tradition of “mind to mind” or “face to face” transmission. The transmission of the Buddha Dharma is the transmission of enlightened wisdom (bodhi prajna) from the Buddha mind to the Buddha mind. Clear seeing is prajna itself; to see “face to face” is to see Shakyamuni face to face – not to see Shakyamuni face to face is not to see Shakyamuni at all.
By bowing down in respect to the Face of Shakyamuni Buddha and by transferring the Eye of Shakyamuni Buddha to our own eyes, we will have transferred our eyes to the Eye of Buddha. Ours will be the very Eye and Face of Buddha. Without even one generation’s break, that which has been conferred face-to-face right up to the present by the mutual Transmission of this Buddha Eye and Buddha Face is this very Face-to-Face Transmission.
…
Be very clear about it: when someone Transmits face-to-face the Treasure House of the Eye of the True Teaching by saying, “You have realized what my Marrow is,” this is plainly an instance of conferring the Face-to-Face Transmission. At that very moment when you let go of your everyday notions of what ‘bones and marrow’ means, there will be the Face-to-Face Transmission of the Buddhas and Ancestors. The Face-to-Face Transmission of the great Full Enlightenment and the Mind seal will involve a particular moment in a definite place.
Shobogenzo, Menju, Hubert Nearman
Clear seeing (prajna) is both the method (means) and goal (end) of Buddhist practice-realization. “Realization” (nirvana, full enlightenment) is the “great death,” the end of the present world, it is the transference of our ordinary, mundane eye, for the Dharma-Eye which sees clearly. “Practice” denotes the ceaseless, ongoing actualization of clear seeing which ever-advances the total exertion, casting off, total exertion, casting off that is the actualization of the universe (genjokoan). Zazen-only is the standard systematic skillful process through which the Buddha Dharma is accurately transmitted and revealed; Zazen-only is the function of “practice” and it is the essence of “realization.” The Buddhist sutras and ancestral records are the vehicle of Dharma Transmission, the body or form of the Buddhist expression of the unified vision of the “great matter of life and death.”
...
Peace,
Ted
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