Winter 2005 — Bussho

In these talks Mike reads a stretch of Master Dogen’s Bussho, from Asvaghosa’s poem to Nagarjuna and Kanadeva, through his own modern interpretation, which he calls a first draft, as pointing to what is real here and now underneath the names and concepts we lay over it. On buddha-nature he puts the emphasis on being rather than having: the mountains, rivers, and Earth are buddha-nature, not something made out of it; a child told he is “without buddha-nature” is without the idea of it; and a person “without any idealistic pretensions” is buddha-nature rather than having it or lacking it. Dogen, he says, allows one to assert both that living beings have buddha-nature and that they are without it once it is truly understood, and Mike adds that it is not something you get but something that appears when you get rid of other things, and that trying to drop things on purpose is still trying to get something. The later talks carry the same point into the present moment: buddha-nature exists just at the present moment, everyone is in that moment whether or not they fully realise it, and in Dogen’s passage on Kanadeva, which Mike reads, buddha-nature is the body manifesting itself just as it is.

He does not ask anyone to give up names or concepts: the “glasses” of names are a layer we need in order to live in human society, and Dogen’s aim, as Mike reads him, is to accept both the conceptual and what is beyond it. The trouble begins, he says, when we believe our concepts of reality are reality, and all wars are based on that; someone who sees concepts as concepts can adjust when reality shows it is not quite so. Understanding is treated the same way: he contrasts fitting what we hear into an existing structure of knowledge with hearing and understanding as one act, and, on Dogen’s advice about Daikan’s words to both try to understand them and give up understanding them, he says we should do both and can choose which at each moment. Everything real has two sides, physical and mental, that are not separate, he says, and what we read in books has one side missing, though he does not say such knowledge has no value. In the story of Nagarjuna, Dogen rejects the reading that the master turned into a full moon; Mike takes the story to show that pride blocks the seeing of buddha-nature and that a teacher without selfish pride manifests himself as he is, so that, in his words, to manifest ourselves just as we are is to be a buddha. He places this state in acting rather than in intention: being in the present is not something one decides to be, the thought “I am mindfully in the present” is not the present, and since we are never anywhere else, even thinking and the human ability to split ourselves, which he calls both our strength and our weakness, take place in it. He says we impose an enduring quality on things, yet the agreement that the world endures is what lets us plan, and the real “me” is the one he finds here at every moment, not the enduring image he holds of himself, which can get a little static.

He finds being oneself without noticing in simple acts, not in decisions: in each such act, like stepping off the top of a ski run or picking up a cup of tea, we throw everything else away for an instant, and he warns that his words make these acts sound too dramatic and should not be trusted. Zazen is the reference for all of this: asked whether it helps once we come out of zazen, he first answers “It doesn’t help at all,” then says that it does help, “but not in a way that we can grasp,” and he explains this through the posture, which changes our psycho-physical state, and, in the last talk, through the balance of the autonomic nervous system. Zazen and study go together for him: he has never met anyone who practiced zazen without ever studying some Buddhist theory and was happy, he calls the two the halves of Buddhism that help uncover our fundamental nature, and he says that other ways to a balanced state exist but are not Buddhism. He says Dogen treats what Kanadeva received from Nagarjuna as more authentic than writings attributed to Nagarjuna, an assertion that cannot be proved but can be made, and that it rests on Dogen’s belief in zazen and in what he learned from his master. Belief, in his account, is not just an idea but what directs action, mentally and physically; he thinks everyone has a basic belief in humanity, that what we come to accept resonates with it, and that the power to assert a belief is the same in every person while what we believe in matters a great deal. In the last talk he says that real life and balance are not like his description, only as near as he can get; that zazen which seems poor is still real zazen, while the ideal is only an idea; and that talking about Buddhism creates an idea that is itself an obstruction.