Ikka-no-myoju
Contemporary retelling — One Bright Pearl
This contemporary retelling is neither Dōgen’s original text nor a translation. It begins with the accepted authorised English translation and carries its teaching, essential relationships, and literary movement into present-day settings. It was written as its author imagines Master Dōgen might present this chapter if he were living and teaching in today’s world.
Source: authorised translation
Master Dogen’s Shobogenzo, Book 1 (Windbell Publications) —
© 1994 by Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross. All rights reserved.
This contemporary retelling was prepared from the authorised English translation cited above, 2026, Robert Spiegel.
What this contemporary retelling says (a one-minute overview) — About contemporary retellings and their overviews
Everything in every direction is one bright pearl, including the people who doubt it. The pearl names the whole of reality, not an object kept somewhere beyond it. When Milan cuts his toe, he questions a borrowed claim that the body is unreal. He cannot settle that question with someone else's words, though he continues to learn with his teacher Eva. Years later Nora, a practitioner at his retreat, asks about the pearl, receives Milan's answer, and repeats it when he turns the question back to her.
Milan's rebuke pictures Nora building a windowless room around herself from his answer. The same words do different work when she merely gives them back to him. Yet her question is itself an action within the pearl, and thinking is not discarded. Counted pastries and two descriptions of one stretch of river show that concrete facts and ways of understanding them both matter. Living and dying, yesterday and today, what we feel and what we distinguish belong to this same whole, which exceeds our plans.
The pearl appears as the whole world considered as one body, the sounds people hear and the changing colours they see, whether the imagined pearl is visible or hidden. Receiving it does not make the drunk person sober. Doubt, worry and even the thought “I cannot be the bright pearl” remain within it, although no narrow account can contain the whole. The six states through which we pass as a consequence of our actions, from hellish suffering to godlike bliss, also belong to this reality; “bright” is no promise that everything feels pleasant. No act or thought has ever had a cause other than this pearl—the whole reality that includes them. At the end, even steps forward and backward inside the windowless room are the pearl itself.
IKKA-NO-MYOJU
One Bright Pearl
For years Milan spent his free time fishing on the river, taking a small boat out with other anglers. He liked the hours on the water. If the bucket was empty at dusk, he washed it out and went home no less content than on a day with a catch. Perhaps he was not even waiting for a miraculous catch to arrive on its own. I cannot say. Milan told me later that at thirty he put the boat away and began to take another kind of life seriously. The world had shown him how little of it he could keep. He joined a local group for zazen, the practice of sitting still and attending to what is here, with Eva as his teacher. He went home after their meetings. His practice went with him through workdays and nights when he would rather have slept.
One day, after their shared zazen, Milan set off to visit a group in another town. Walking in sandals, he stubbed his toe on a stone just outside the building. The skin split and bled; every step hurt. He had heard people say that the body was not truly real. Suddenly that saying no longer fitted what he felt. If the body was not real, where had this pain come from? He went back inside, cleaned the cut at the sink and found Eva still there.
“What happened to our tireless sitter?” she asked. Milan pointed to his injured foot. “In the end I can't be fooled by somebody else's words,” he said. “It would be convenient if I could.”
Eva liked that. “Who doesn't have words like yours somewhere in them?” she asked. “And who can actually say them?” After a pause she asked, “When your toe heals, will you still visit that group?”
“I may still go,” Milan said. “But I won't bring truth back from that town, or leave it here by going.” Eva smiled. “Well said.”
Milan had come to her without knowing the Buddhist books. Resolve was what he had, and he kept using it. Eva called him one of the most steadfast people in the group. He practiced for years amid his ordinary work and life, returning to the shared room to sit and to ask. On winter evenings he came straight from work, tired and cold, and sat with the group anyway. Winter after winter he returned. Eva remained his only teacher. After a long time he could speak to others from that practice: everything in every direction is one bright pearl.
Years later I joined a three-day retreat he led. We had come from our separate homes to sit together and would return to them when it ended. On the first evening, Nora, one of the practitioners, asked, “You say that everything in every direction is one bright pearl. How am I meant to understand it?”
“Everything in every direction is one bright pearl,” Milan said. “What use is understanding?”
The next morning he nodded and laughed quietly as he turned his own words around. “Everything in every direction is one bright pearl,” he said to her. “How do you understand it?”
Nora answered, “Everything in every direction is one bright pearl. What use is understanding?”
Milan looked at her. “I see you working hard to build a room with no windows around yourself. You are using my answer for the walls.”
Do not picture a jewel suspended somewhere above the sky, with the rest of the world arranged around it. Everything in every direction includes the cut toe, the stone, Eva's smile, Nora's question and the sound of a chair being moved. The pearl is not immense or small, square or round, located at the centre or stretched along a line. It is not a frenzy of activity, nor is it laid out in perfect clarity for inspection. Because it is beyond living and dying, coming and going, it is living and dying, coming and going. On the day Milan struck the stone, no argument made the blood imaginary.
Yesterday has gone from here; this morning has arrived from here. Can I separate those moments and hold up one without the other? Can I put the whole thing on a table and wait for it to become still? I take things into what I call myself; I go out among things and become something there. Anger, tenderness and the distinctions I make are as real as turning my head to see who has come in. The moment sometimes outruns every attempt to arrange it.
The phrase “one pearl” may still sound strange. It will find its listeners. It passes through age after age without becoming a relic. The past has not finished, and the present has arrived. The body is here. The mind is here. I can name the grass by the path, the trees, the river and the hills, but the pearl is not a heap made by adding their names together. Each name points here; none puts the whole beyond the things named.
Nor was Nora's first question an error to be thrown out. Her asking was already an act in this world. A wave is water in motion, nothing laid over the water: however far the wave reaches, the water reaches just as far. So with the pearl and its brightness. In practice too, buddha follows buddha, teacher follows teacher, Milan follows Milan. He may wish to step outside that succession and try hard to do it; the wish and the effort happen in the whole moment in which he speaks and breathes.
The first evening Milan had given Nora the sentence. In the morning he turned it around: yesterday's answer had become today's question. Nora gave him his answer back. She was chasing Milan on a horse borrowed from Milan: his words carried her, but could not answer for her. The two voices sounded alike across the room; in what they were doing, they might have been speaking from different worlds. Turn the light of attention back for a while. Sit zazen. How many different occasions can there be for asking, “What use is understanding?”
At lunch there were seven cheese pastries and five vegetable ones. We could count them and decide how to share them. The stretch of river near Milan's old fishing place lay downstream from one bridge and upstream from another: two ways to locate the same water. A fact does not become less concrete because we consider where we stand; a useful description does not replace what we can see and eat. “What use?” has more than one answer.
The room still has no windows. Repeating the word “light” will not make an opening in the wall. The sun shows the sun's face and the moon the moon's; they have never exchanged places. Someone who wants to keep a family name private may answer a stranger's question with a polite remark about the season. On a July day that person might say, “It's a hot summer, but a lovely one.” It does not make their surname Hot. The season remains the season; the name remains the name. Naming the pearl does not give its reality a first moment or an outer edge.
The whole world is one body. The whole body is the eye of true teaching; the whole body is reality itself; the whole body is a phrase and brightness. Nothing lies outside it to obstruct or complete it. Round, the pearl rolls. People practising here today see a face before them and hear a voice. Those who awakened long ago, and those who awaken now, appear in bodies and teach. No extra pearl is brought in for the seeing or the hearing.
Picture the one pearl hanging in open air, tucked inside a coat, held in a closed hand, or hidden beneath an overturned cup. Its situation is where it is. Do not look on the outside of the coat for what is inside, or at the back of the hand for what lies against its palm. The same pearl does not become another one because it is hidden from this angle. Picture a friend giving me a pearl on a cord when I am drunk. I hang it around my neck; it rests against my chest, and still I am drunk. Later I lift the cord off and give that same pearl to another friend. In her palm it seems to turn, then to stand still. Its appearance changes; recognizing that these changing appearances have always belonged to the same pearl is itself the pearl.
Someone may still say, “I cannot be the bright pearl.” That doubt is not outside it. Neither are the effort to attach myself to an answer and the wish to reject one. I take a narrow view when I insist the whole must fit my understanding. How could I not love this pearl? Listen to the sounds of the whole world; see the pearl's changing colours. There is no last colour to arrive at and keep.
Who would want to steal the colours of this light? Try carrying daylight home in a shopping bag. Do not mistake “bright” for “pleasant.” What we do has consequences. As a result, we pass through six states of existence: hellish suffering, insatiable hunger, life ruled by instinct, struggle driven by anger, ordinary human life, and godlike bliss. We need not worry about falling or not falling into them; we still bear the consequences of what we do. These six states are the original condition of being, clear from head to foot. The pearl is its face and eyes.
Still, neither you nor I finally know what the pearl is or is not. Hundreds of thoughts, and hundreds of refusals of thought, make a remarkably clear idea. We have heard Milan's words and clearly recognized that body and mind have already become the pearl. Mind is not personal, then: it has no private owner standing apart from what arises and passes. Why worry over whether this is a pearl or is not a pearl, as though what arises and passes were a person we could ask for a name? Worry is here too. No act and no thought has ever had a cause other than this one bright pearl: the whole of reality. Even the steps forward and backward inside that room without windows, built from borrowed words, are the pearl itself.