Summer 2005 — Bussho

In these four talks Mike reads Master Dogen’s Bussho as rejecting buddha-nature as a special quality that beings get by effort and keep inside themselves, and as pointing to something real in the present moment that no concept of it captures. He puts the emphasis on being rather than having: in his reading Dogen takes Enkan’s “have” as closer to “are buddhas by nature”, and, in a phrase from Mike’s translation that a participant praises, the state of buddha is the state of being without, which he later describes as being without the things we layer over ourselves. Dogen, as Mike renders him, quotes Hyakujo that saying either “have” or “without” insults the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, yet says that buddha-nature cannot be discussed without these phrases, and Mike locates the trouble with “have” in imagining a separate thing that I get and then have. The Hyakujo and Obaku stories carry this into the present moment: as Mike reads them, we can find freedom if we throw away rather than build up our abilities, but it is the freedom of the present moment, not a permanent state, in the only world there is, where the twenty-four hours of a day are “now, now, now, now”.

On Joshu’s “mu” in the dog koan, Mike adds words that are not in the original, “Without [any concept of buddha-nature]”, because that makes sense to him, and reads Dogen as saying that the dog and buddha-nature exist without any concept, so that buddha-nature is not a concept. On Joshu’s “It exists”, he reads Dogen as meaning a real dog here rather than the existence of scholars and theorists, so that if the dog exists, buddha-nature exists and need not enter it from elsewhere, and he calls the Buddhist view that reality or existence is only at the moment of the present a strange one that we find quite bizarre. Joshu says that although we recognise it we can’t help mistaking our thoughts for the real situation, and Mike adds that this is the nature of thought and we can’t stop it, but we can notice it, and that Dogen suggests we need not seek a state free of the mistake, only recognise what the human condition is. In the earthworm story Mike reads Dogen as saying that once the worm is cut, the one worm that existed before no longer exists, and says that discussing buddha-nature in the story is discussing not buddha-nature but the concept of it, while the master’s answer is very realistic and could let the officer, and us, notice a very real and simple situation. Taking up a participant’s comparison with Dogen’s firewood and ash, he says that Dogen is only focussing us on the present, while we usually link past and present as process. In Mike’s rendering, Dogen says that in the moment in which we live and in the moment in which we die we totally manifest buddha-nature and are without any [concept of] buddha-nature, and that thinking it exists only while there is life is too simple-minded.

Mike takes the chapter’s last line, which calls buddha-nature “the usual mix of thinking, frustration, and stupidity in which we live our lives”, to say not that ultimate reality is our thoughts but that it includes everything, including our thoughts, and he says that we have real thoughts in the present moment but create scenarios with them that are not reality. He says that Buddhism has to be studied based on zazen, since if we read descriptions of wonderful beings as such and study Buddhism on that basis we can never understand it, and that relating Buddhist concepts only to other concepts can make us very clever scholars who never understand Buddhism. Mike says that for Dogen learning is throwing away and becoming buddha is throwing away the desire to become one, though he admits that he does not think like that when he wants a piece of work, and he says that an idea of throwing away should be thrown away first, which he calls a puzzle, although we do it. He offers this as his own reading: he chose “without” because it makes sense to him and leaves listeners to judge whether it does to them, says that he cannot check his own work and asks to be told when something is round the wrong way, and calls his picking out of the difference between having and being the best he can do so far. He calls it a real puzzle that, according to Dogen, even someone trapped in the concept of buddha-nature still has buddha-nature, and says that he hasn’t a clue what buddha-nature is, yet, asked whether the last sentence means that we need not worry much about it, he answers that we need not worry about it at all.