This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So good morning, everyone. Welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Wendy Lewis, and I'm teaching a class on the Genjo Koan, so that is what I'm going to speak about today. This is a work by Ehei Dogen, also known as Dogen Kigen, and he is considered the founder of Soto Zen in Japan. Genjo Koan is one of everyone's favorites of his writings from the Shobo Genzo. And I think its popularity is based a lot on its imagery, on the fact that it doesn't sort of emphasize doctrine, and on its mystical sort of quality.

[01:06]

So Dogen lived in the first half of the 13th century, about 800 years ago. And so most of his life stories are kind of hagiographies or saints. life type stories. But he did travel to China, and he met someone he identified as his teacher, Rui Jing, and then he eventually founded Eiheiji in Japan. Most of Dogen's writings were not studied or chanted or anything. They were rediscovered at the beginning of the 18th century. And then, I mean the 19th century, sorry. Later then. And then they didn't really start to be translated into English or commentaries until mid 20th century, a little bit earlier. But now we have many different translations of his works and commentaries.

[02:15]

And the The most recent one, and the one I'm using for the class, is Shohaku Okamura's Realizing Genjo Koan, and that was published in 2010. So Dogen wrote Genjo Koan just after he had written a commentary on the Heart Sutra called Makahanya Haramitsu, and in that one he goes through doctrine, and he adds even more than is in the Heart Sutra and elaborates and so on. And Okamura proposes that the Genjo Koan is a further commentary on the Heart Sutra. It was addressed to a lay disciple, which may be why there's not as much doctrine in it, but I think the lay disciple probably knew at least the Heart Sutra, if not some of the things in it. So these things are embedded in it, but they're not, he doesn't name them.

[03:22]

So the Heart Sutra, on the other hand, is this list. And they're these teachings of Buddhism, things like the Four Noble Truths, the 12-fold chain of causation, the five skandhas, and all those things, they're presented in the context of emptiness. So they're listed with a no before them. They're all sort of listed in terms of negation. But the list itself is the affirmation. And the negation is this implication that they should be viewed through the perspective of emptiness. So you study the teachings, but you always do it in this context of emptiness. And that emptiness perspective is prajnaparamita. That's what it means, the wisdom perspective, perfect wisdom. So through emptiness, we can undercut our attachment.

[04:41]

to the teachings, our ideas that we know what they mean, or we can tell somebody else what they mean, or that we can rest in them without examining the way that they are relative and that they are imbued with the absolute. And I'll say more about that. Relative and absolute aspects have to do both with meaning and with application or praxis or practice. So through the perspective of emptiness, therefore non-attachment to the teachings, it allows us to apply them to deconstruct all our ideas about what we already know, or how we see the world, or how we interpret these teachings, and then to reconstruct them when they have gone through this conversation between their relative and their absolute meaning.

[06:00]

To me, this is the ability to be open to the possibilities of what that Dharma is actually offering us. I think that the relative and the absolute are always interacting in emptiness, and in some ways I think of this as a conversation. And this is what I think Suzuki Roshi was referring to when he said this famous thing, you know, in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few. because the beginner is willing to start again and again and again, or realization beyond realization. So Dogen's central koan is practice realization. Those two things. How do they inform each other? What do they mean to each other? And the question is, if we're already all enlightened, in terms of original enlightenment, we're all already Buddha,

[07:08]

why do we have to practice? And that's his central koan. So by practice, we don't all really know what that means. We sort of say it's this, we say it's that, we say it's meditation, we say it's something. But what Dogen means, and he talks about this in the Makahanya Haramitsu, is these three training aspects, which are sila, samadhi, and prajna. So sila is... precepts, ethics, morality. And samadhi is meditation, reflection, contemplation. And prajna is study, wisdom, understanding. So these three are practice. So Ginjo Khan begins with three sentences. The first one describes the relative. the second, the absolute, and the third, the context of emptiness.

[08:09]

And this sets up how you should read the rest of the kohan, how you should see what he's doing. And then the next section does that as well, but this is the basic perspective. And this is Okamura's translation. Relative. When all dharmas are the Buddha dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, life and death, Buddhas and living beings. And then the absolute. When the 10,000 dharmas are without fixed self, there is no delusion and no realization, no Buddhas and no living beings, no birth and no death. And then the interactivity of emptiness, which you'll hear the word dichotomy is what this is about. Since the Buddha way by nature goes beyond the dichotomy of abundance and deficiency, there is a rising and perishing delusion and realization living beings and Buddhists.

[09:26]

And then the next section sets forward the problem that this poses, which is what's going to be examined. Therefore, flowers fall even though we love them. Weeds grow even though we dislike them. Conveying oneself toward all things to carry out practice enlightenment is delusion. All things coming and carrying out practice enlightenment through the self is realization. Those who greatly realize delusion are Buddhas. Those who are greatly deluded in realization our living beings. Furthermore, there are those who attain realization beyond realization and those who are deluded within delusion. So Dolan is examining this interactivity of delusion and enlightenment, relative and the absolute, which are completely dependent on each other.

[10:34]

It's not like you can choose one or choose one view and then hang out there. Well, you can, but then they're not what they are. Because as soon as you hang out in enlightenment, it's delusion. So you can't stay anywhere. And since they're both arising, we develop attachments to our interpretations of them. I think this is what we're supposed to do, actually. It's part of the development of our practice. And then we let go of the attachment, and Okumara calls this opening the hand of thought. And he describes it as happening specifically and more directly in meditation. And I think that's kind of meditation gives us a context for examining how these things are interacting and arising one and then the other and one and then the other and then this opening the hand of thought.

[11:43]

But it can be, you know, that perspective can occur anywhere. So we are simultaneously Buddhas and sentient beings and So our practice and realization, you know, through applying the teachings and through permeability, non-attachment, is continuous. Practice and realization, continuous. And these three kinds of training that he calls practice, or that he's referring to in terms of practice, shila ethics, samadhi or meditation, and prajna or wisdom are interrelated. And so they are part of this conversation as well. And if we don't examine each of those and their relationship to each other, then we can get lost in self-reifying, which I think is actually another, it is part of practice, you know, where we basically make our own understanding the truth.

[12:51]

And you can't help it, you know. almost like a survival technique, you know. And we also can get lost in painful, dreamy, or flat meditative states when the conversation is not happening. So remembering the three things always, shila, prajna, and samadhi, or shila, samadhi, prajna, enlivens, they enliven each other. And our Meditation does need enlivening. So my reading of Genjal Koan's To Study the Buddha Way is to Study the Self. To study the self is to forget the self. And to forget the self is to be verified by all things, is that to study means to apply the teaching of Buddhism to one's conditioned mind, which is also the body, heart, mind. When we say it's just the mind, we might get caught in some intellectual idea, which is fun, but it's the body, heart, mind that is involved in enlightenment.

[14:01]

So the Dogen scholar, Hee Jin Kim, he wrote a biography and commentary on Dogen and some other things on him, refers to Dogen as a moralist. And in his commentary on the fascicle, not to commit any evil, he says, Dogen's moral reason refuses the conventional bifurcation of is and ought or of morality and religion. Not to commit any evil is ever intimate with the dialectical dynamics of practice and enlightenment. So again, that conversation, even in the context of ethics, it's a conversation. And our relationship to ethics, Shila, is an unfolding conversation between kind of the way things are,

[15:17]

and the way we wish they should be, or think they should be. And so studying ethics, along with the reflective practice of meditation, where you consider your life and what comes and goes, and then applying to it, or adding in, allowing the context of prajna or the perspective of emptiness. And that's the perspective of what Hee Jin Kim calls the dialectical dynamics of practice and enlightenment. This interactivity is what allows for our continuous effort and continuous transformation and understanding. So Okamura comments, if we don't find nirvana within samsara, there is no place we can find nirvana.

[16:25]

If we don't find peacefulness within our busy lives, there is no place we can find peacefulness. So nirvana is not something that can be projected into the future or even into the present. We can't imagine it. We can't say, oh, When I'm enlightened, this is how things will be. Because how could they be any different than they are? There's nowhere to go. There's just what we have and where we are. And so Dogen says that conveying oneself forward in this way by projecting is delusion. We are projecting our preferences and our perceived needs you know, onto a concept of liberation. Like if I were free, if I were enlightened, if I had experienced nirvana, I wouldn't have this problem or that problem or this, whatever.

[17:27]

So I am trying to go through the whole Genjo Koan. So the next section that I'm going to comment on is... Dogen's commentary on the Heart Sutra is All Buddhas of Past, Present, and Future. And this is when Dogen is writing about firewood and ash. And this is an examination or a query of how we can become a Buddha through practice of the Buddha's teachings and meditation. So does it happen in time? Or... Does it happen within time and not restricted by time and continuous all at the same time? So firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot become firewood again. So transformation occurs, but not within the limitations of before and after.

[18:43]

And I thought, well, You know, the firewood could be Shakyamuni, all the Buddhas that came before him, all the Buddhas and teachers and everyone who came after him. And then there's ash, is that Shakyamuni as well, and all these Buddhas, and past, present, and future, as well as ourselves. So without the firewood, there is no ash, but each Buddha... has to practice within the context and conditions of their own time and place. You have to be fire, you have to be ash when that is what's appropriate or that's what is the present. So we can't project into the future or the present an imagined state of nirvana.

[19:46]

But we also can't project into the past a process for realizing nirvana. Ash stays in the position of ash with its own before and after. So each one of us. And this section is also a commentary on the 12-fold chain of causation where, you know, we think that there's birth and death and that there's this that's only happening in time. But it's also happening in eternity. And so he's referring to that as well. The 12-fold chain of causation begins with ignorance and ends with old age and death. And it's a continuous pattern. So that's also what he's saying. And I think what happens, or... What's being referred to is that we're caught in the horizontal dimension of the path to enlightenment, for instance, and we forget this vertical dimension of the absolute, that there's something going on besides our relative understanding and the way time moves horizontally.

[21:09]

So Dogen goes on to describe realization as like the moon's reflection in water. So the moon is one of the very few bright lights that we can stare at without it hurting our eyes. So we can look and look and look, and that's kind of the fascination of the moon. It's just this beautiful light that doesn't hurt our eyes like the sun or a bright light bulb or something like that. And I think that's a wonderful way to kind of see enlightenment. Duggan says, realization does not destroy the person as the moon does not make a hole in the water. In Mysticism, a study by Evelyn Underhill, she writes that the mystics repeat over and over that in the fruition of the spiritual path, personality is not lost but made more real.

[22:14]

And I think that that's what that means. Realization does not destroy the person. And Okamura discusses the term Satori that Dogen uses as realization as having implications of awakening and its opposite being dreaming or sleeping. and I think the depth of the drop is the same as the height, as Okamura translates it, is about the extent of awakening being correlated to the depth of our study of the self. So when we're dreaming of enlightenment, the moon seems so close, so accessible. But then, when we're engaged in this interactivity of the relative and the absolute, the moon is illuminating everything and reflected in everything.

[23:20]

So if you know the Genjo Koan, or when you find it or read it, if you ever do, there'll probably be sections of it that will be your favorites. or have a stronger resonance. And for me, it's the section on firewood and ash, and then the next section that begins, when the Dharma has not yet fully penetrated body and mind, one thinks one is already filled with it. When the Dharma fills body and mind, one thinks or understands that something is lacking. So even when I came to practice, I was pretty open and didn't know what was going to happen and all that kind of thing. But at the same time, I think I had a fairly complacent viewpoint that it would sort of fulfill some expectations or needs that I had. And I think that's pretty normal.

[24:32]

And I had lots of experiences and ideas. It was wonderful, and I think that's all necessary. The inspiration and the openings and everything are so important to building a strong practice, or even a practice. But I think, you know, as the workings of, I will call it dharma, Dovin calls it the Buddha dharma, start to have an effect like, you know, when you sit a sishin and after a while you just let go of all your, you know, ideas about how this works and how you can be comfortable and, you know, and that's the point. But it makes you start to consider that maybe there's something beyond the familiar, beyond what one already knows and assumes.

[25:35]

So Dogen describes in this section the experience of being out in a boat beyond sight of land when the horizon looks like a circle. That's all we can see is this circle and we're in the middle of it. Yet he says the ocean is neither round nor square. It has inexhaustible characteristics. We can only see to the horizon of the circle... And we only see or grasp as far as the power of our eye of study and practice can see. So just keeping that image in mind, seeing we are in the center of this circle. We're always in a boat in the middle of the ocean with this defined horizon. the Catholic theologian Bernard Lonergan has a way of speaking about the relative and the absolute and their interrelationship, and he describes this as having three components.

[26:46]

One is the known, and that's basically our, you know, the things that are immediate and apparent and familiar to us. And that includes our value systems. And then the known unknown, is concepts and social and political structures and that sort of thing that are familiar to us even though we may not know quite how they function, but we accept them. And these are the description of relative reality. Seems pretty understandable. And then the unknown unknown is his description of absolute reality and it is a context beyond our immediate knowing. So here we are in the middle of the ocean, and there's this circular horizon. And his sense is that that horizon is permeable. There's something loose there.

[27:48]

So in a commentary on Lonergan, Kenneth Melchin writes, the process in which horizons move back to embrace elements that previously were beyond our imagining, we will call conversion. So that, I think that's what transformation or enlightenment is. It's a form of conversion. And it's not like we're being converted from something or to something like Buddhism or something like that. But through... sort of agreeing to this interactivity of the relative and absolute. When that horizon is allowed to be permeable, then we are turned by something. And I thought, well, aversion, which is basically the second noble truth, it includes desire and hate and indifference, is a turning away.

[28:56]

Conversion is turning with or being turned by. And that's often how the Dharma is described as something that turns or turns us or we're turned by it. So then the next section, he uses the images of birds and fish to describe that there is no other place to go. You know, all the conditions of our lives and their consequences are the resource for our moral, meditative, and wisdom examinations and insights. The sky is life, the water is life, the bird is life, the fish is life. This is where we are. There's no other place to go. And then Dogen starts into a summary of all this, and he says... When we make this place, very place our own, our practice becomes the actualization of reality, or yenja koan.

[30:07]

When we make this path our own, our activity naturally becomes actualized reality, yenja koan. So in the translation that I'm more familiar with, the next part reads, here is the place, here the way unfolds. The boundary of realization is not distinct, for the realization comes forth simultaneously with the mastery of Buddha Dharma. And Okamura translates the second sentence as, The boundary of the known is not clear. This is because the known, which appears limited, is born and practiced simultaneously with the complete penetration of the Buddha Dharma, which is where that Lonergan's imagery is echoed.

[31:11]

So I think generally we move through our lives with the or the assumption without it necessarily being conscious that this circular horizon is something, you know, we just carry it with us. We don't examine it or we don't worry about it. I guess it's even a milder way to think of it. But through this, we judge the world and we limit the world and our experience of it. And it seems to be an edge rather than a place of possibility. And I think this eye of practice that starts to see how emptiness works, not emptiness as a concept, but emptiness as this conversation, this interactivity between our relative perspective and then this absolute that we can't imagine,

[32:20]

that is on that edge. It allows that edge to blur and to become permeable in a conscious way. That's always happening. There's not really that edge. It's not like there's the relative and the absolute and they're separate. But it's our way of holding that edge and not recognizing or not being willing to be affected. by the absolute, the unimagined. And that do we really want to be enlightened is kind of the question underneath all this. Because, you know, when we get that sensation of being awakened and what it costs in terms of blurring our assumptions and our needs and our projections and our fantasies about our lives and other people's lives, it's kind of scary a little bit.

[33:33]

It's disorienting is maybe a better word for it. So here we are in our little boat and the circle is around us and we're carrying it around and then sometimes if we start to sit meditation particularly, that will start to blur. Or if we have a traumatic experience sometimes, that edge will start to blur. But to accept the disorientation, realize that the way you address the disorientation is shila, samadhi, prajna. You have tools. And this is what Buddhism offers, and it's called practice. So not to be afraid of the disorientation means that awakening is possible. So at the end of the Genjo Koan, we actually got to the end, there's a conversation that interrelates the relative and the absolute and is demonstrated in an exchange between a student and a teacher.

[34:36]

And the wind is the Buddha Dharma. The teacher is fanning himself and the student asks, the nature of wind is ever present and permeates everywhere. Why are you waving a fan? The teacher responds, You know that the wind's nature is ever-present. You don't know that it permeates everywhere. The monk said, How does wind permeate everywhere? The master just continued waving the fan. And the monk bowed deeply. So this waving the fan, you know, Shiva, Samadhi, Prajna. And he's doing it in the, within the unfolding, it happens within the unfolding of realization. This conversation, the student and the teacher and the fan. So Hee Jin Kim describes Dogen as a mystical realist.

[35:47]

And Evelyn Underhill, in that same book on mysticism, writes that because the spiritual path includes so many ups and downs and absurdities, because yes, when the edges start to blur, things can get, as I said, disorienting and absurd, but because that happens, it's not always noticeable that in its fruition, a mystic becomes a sharply intuitive and painfully practical person. And I think we can hear this in Dogen's teachings and in Suzuki Roshi's and in others, Katagiri Roshi, that sharply intuitive and painfully practical. And because the spiritual path and the efforts to understand the teachings tend to unmoor us to bring about this kind of disorientation, there's usually an emotional component, a kind of side effect.

[36:57]

And sometimes it'll take us into kind of acting out and touching edges and memories and our conditioned emotionality, you know, and that sort of thing. And what I think over... like understanding that and that that's part of the process, like starting to include those ups and downs and that disorientation, it allows us to develop something that might surprise us in a way. We call, you know, we talk about compassion in many different ways, and it's usually, we think of it as how we feel for other people. But this This process that happens requires us to develop compassion for ourselves. It's another conversation between wisdom and compassion. Our wisdom is dependent on this kind of inclusion, this ability to accept ourselves, but not in that corny way, even though that's also important, but that permeating way.

[38:15]

because that compassion then lets us look around and see everybody else going through their process and feel compassion. Oh yes, I remember. Oh yeah, I know what that's like. Or whatever. Because it is a deconstructive and reconstructive examination and process. So Okamura describes this in his commentary on the earlier section about flowers and weeds. Since weeds are stronger than we are, we can never get rid of them all. And this sometimes makes us angry or sad, just as working with our delusions can make us frustrated or hopeless. If we are not actually doing the weeding, we can be objective and say weeds are just weeds, while we claim to neither like nor dislike weeds. Yet when we have to do the work of weeding, it is difficult to say that weeds are just weeds.

[39:16]

So the flowers fade even though we love them, the weeds grow even though we dislike them. I think we should still continue to appreciate the flowers even though they fade and to do our best to regulate the weeds even though they tend to proliferate beyond our control. But they're part of it. These are also our resources, the fact that things fade. the fact that things proliferate that we dislike, that's our resource. So practice realization includes the joy of beauty and its loss and the sorrow and anger of our difficulties, as well as the potential for all this to be a resource for our understanding and liberation. Thank you very much.

[40:28]

Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:52]

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