Summer 2004 — Bussho

Across these talks Mike reads Master Dogen’s Bussho through an unfinished modern phrase, “fully manifesting existence”: buddha-nature is living and acting as we are in this moment, not a quality gained by moving up through the ranks, by ability accumulated day by day, or by practice aimed at a result. He keeps the denials that follow in the chapter: it is not Senika’s enduring self, not a return to a lost state, not a future attainment, and, in the commentary he reads on the next poem, not a nature that will reveal itself later. He says buddha-nature and Uji are one fact, total expression in the present,^3.18 and he reads the poem’s buddha-nature as real present time together with what is happening.

What carries that fact, as he describes it, is action in which the division between a self-centred world and the external world drops, if only for an instant, as when someone picks up a cup of tea; he agrees that zazen is such an action, and that doing, not the talk about doing, is the basis of life.^1.20 In that instant, he says, there is no place from which to look at ourselves,^2.6 and he keeps the stronger wording that drinking a glass of water is the present itself; the thought “oh, I’m a buddha now” comes only afterwards, so he says we cannot know we are buddha. He does not make this a ban on thinking: the mind is always busy, and when it is not busy there is no mind; we cannot stop thinking, yet a thought can point toward the basis, which stays outside the thought. He reads Dogen as denying another world outside this Universe and another me at this present moment, and he says that “we are as we are” does not mean we cannot change. It is not wrong, he says, to think that we train in order to become a buddha, and we have to talk about practice as a process, while fully manifesting existence is not the result of that training; asked to reverse the sentence so that reality manifests us, he keeps both viewpoints, because either one can send people looking for a something or a me.

He reads the present as including both the eternal past and the eternal present. He treats the picture of a seed that grows into a buddha as romantic thinking: seeds, flowers, and fruit exist as they are. His gloss “freedom in this moment” is the phrase he has put for the heart of the matter, and he says he does not know whether it is the best one. Where the passage says that at the very time of doubt buddha-nature is just coming back, he says the doubting itself is buddha-nature, and that there is no separate “it” which runs away. He does not say the process view of life should be dropped; without that view, he says, there would be no civilisation. He does not mean, as a criticism, that thinking and talking take us from the present; taking the separate area for reality is, he says, the source of a lot of our suffering, or of our problems. He takes Master Kodo Sawaki’s warning not to take the temperature of zazen to mean that we should not compare: the person sitting now is the only me there is,^4.19 and every other zazen is imaginary. When the chapter’s explanation is finished, he says he wants to rely on zazen and not work out how the chapter can help him. Asked why we keep explaining instead of only sitting, he answers only for himself: after twenty-five years the only thing he has to teach is how to practice and what he learned from Nishijima Roshi about Dogen.