This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good afternoon. I guess because of the nature of this recorder, I should sit down and talk. But that's not my usual nature. I usually want to stand. So I feel a little weird. And I look a little weird. So the title that I proposed to our great master leader, Greg, was... What was it? Dogen, what's up with that guy? Because he'd originally asked me to do a talk on a fascicle of Dogen, a chapter of Shobo Genzo or something. And I've done that before, but I don't know. I'm kind of a little bored with... Tuing talks about a fascicle of Dogen.

[01:00]

And just in conversation with a few people around here, I got the impression that for a lot of people, don't really get the connection, the supposed connection between the practice we do here and the Dogen stuff that is often quoted or read or whatever, fed to us, right? So I would like to tell you a little bit about my personal relationship with Jesus. I mean Dogen. Because it might be instructive. I don't know. And if it's useless, I'll open it up to Q&A halfway through, and then we can just talk about something else. So I'm assuming, just looking around here, everybody has a... has at least the basic grasp of who Dogen was. I was kind of thinking, would I have to give a little bit of Dogen's life story here, but can I assume that?

[02:04]

Okay, the very, very short version, Dogen was born in 1200, died in 1253, quite young, if you actually do the math there, which is easy, probably of tuberculosis, though nobody really knows because there was no such diagnosis available at the time. And he was a Japanese Buddhist monk who apparently was born of royalty and lost both of his parents at a young age and decided to study Buddhism. Ended up going to China. I'm giving a very quick version. Because he was dissatisfied with the type of Buddhism that was available in Japan at the time. Which presents us with a... sort of interesting parallel to our own time because Buddhism had only been introduced to Japan about a hundred years before Dogen was born, which is about how long Buddhism has been available, maybe a little less than a hundred years in the United States.

[03:07]

So it was a new thing and so he wanted to go to the source. You know, although times have changed drastically, it's sort of roughly equivalent to one of us deciding we'd better go to Japan, sort of like what I did, to find the original source of Buddhism, of Zen or something, because we weren't satisfied with what we found here, which isn't why I went to Japan. I went to Japan to make money, because I wasn't making money in America, but ended up finding a Japanese Buddhist teacher who talked a lot about Doga. So... That's Dogen in a nutshell. My personal take on Dogen, though, I think might be more useful than a sort of a scholarly, which I can't even, I'm not even really capable to do. If I stand up, maybe if I stand up without moving too much, because I'm uncomfortable sitting down. It makes me more nervous. My...

[04:11]

My personal relationship with the works of Dogen, though obviously not the man himself, is that when I was 18 or 19, I took this class called Zen Buddhism at Kent State University, taught by this guy named Tim McCarthy. Tim McCarthy was a student of Kobincino Roshi, who some of you are probably familiar with. who was one of the people that Shunyu Suzuki brought over to the United States to help him with San Francisco Zen Center in the early days. So there was a strong Dogen connection there. But he didn't, Tim wasn't really any sort of a Dogen scholar. He might have quoted Dogen here or there, and I remember he had a set of the early translation of Shobo Genzo. You've got it over in the library over there. It's got a white cover. I don't know who did it. But I never read it.

[05:14]

I lived with him in his place, which they called the Kent Zendo. I never read it. But I moved to Japan in 1993 and worked as an English teacher there for a year. And in 1994 got a job with a company called Tsuburaya Productions which is a company that makes tokusatsu films, special effects movies, Japanese monster movies with guys in rubber suits crushing little model cars and stores and things. It's great. And that moved me to Tokyo and I looked around for a Buddhist teacher, Zen teacher to study with and I found this guy named Gudo Nishijima. And Mishijima, as it so happens, at that very moment I met him, was busy getting this thing published. This is book four, but it's a four-volume translation of Shobo Genzo.

[06:15]

And at the time, it was, I believe, the only full English translation of Shobo Genzo available. I don't think there were any others. It is now... as far as I know, still only one of two, the other one being this expensive piece of work by Kazuaki Tanahashi and Friends, which you're probably more familiar with this version. So Nishijima was obviously very interested in Dogen. The story of how Dogen... why Nishijima was interested in Dogen, as I've been kind of learning it over the years of sort of researching it, is to me sort of interesting. And I'll tell you. Most of us, as I just said, most people at least are aware that Dogen's writings are about 800 years old.

[07:15]

So people, when they're first introduced to Dogen, tend to assume, as I tended to assume, that people have been interested in Dogen for the past 800 years. But But that's not the case. The interest in Dogen, in studying Dogen, is pretty much a phenomenon that started in the 20th century and actually can be tracked down, I had to write the guy's name down because I'd forgotten it, to one guy. His name is Tetsuru Watsugi and he was a scholar who wrote a series of articles in around 1920 for... a kind of a Buddhist nerd magazine in Japan, or a couple of Buddhist nerd magazines in Japan, that sparked off a lot of interest. Dogen's work had been preserved in Eheiji, mostly in Eheiji Temple, and probably in other places, because I have read about it being stored in different locations.

[08:16]

But, you know, he wrote this huge monster Shobo Genzo, as well as a bunch of other things. And... They weren't really, after he died, they kind of just put them away, and Dogen was revered as a person, and so his writings were kept as kind of almost like holy relics that people preserved very carefully but didn't read. It was, I, my understanding of it, and I think this is... borne out in some of the literature of people who've researched it better than me, is that it was a sort of force of his personality that got people interested and that was able to carry his lineage on and it became the most popular Zen lineage in Japan. It's got the most of... I think probably the Jodo Shinshu is more popular in terms of Buddhism as a whole. But there are more temples in Soto than in Rinzai and certainly in Obaku Zen.

[09:20]

But nobody read his stuff. And it was up to this person to rediscover it. Another person who's kind of... significant in this is Kodo Sawaki who some of you probably have heard of. He was active from maybe the 1940s until his death in I think 1965. And he was a Japanese Zen monk who also like Dogen lost both parents at an early age and decided to enter a monastery. And he became fascinated with the writings of Dogen. which would have been something that was kind of newly available to people like him. And he became a very serious scholar of Dogen. And he became convinced that the Soto Shu, the Soto organization in Japan, had become kind of corrupt and was not doing its job. And its job was to teach people about Zazen.

[10:27]

Uh, so he, he, uh, became known as Homeless Kodo. He didn't keep a temple of his own. He wandered around Japan, um, teaching people to, to do zazen, holding these kind of retreats and things. Uh, among the people who went and saw Kodo Sawaki, uh, do these talks and lead these, uh, seshins and things were, uh, my teacher, um, Gudo Nishijima, Shunyu Suzuki Roshi, who founded this place, Kobanchino, also went and saw Sawaki Talk, and a few others who have become extremely influential. So what we end up with is a situation where Dogen sort of flourishes in Japan and now is very... widely known in the U.S. and also beginning to be more widely known in Europe. Which is very interesting because how many Japanese Zen philosophers or Japanese philosophers of any kind can you go into Barnes and Nobles and get books about?

[11:37]

You can get books about Dogen. So he's very widely read. Back to my personal relationship with the I started studying with Nishijima when he was finished with this, with the writing of it. And they were in the midst of getting it published. And when I showed this to you, I just happened to glance, 1999 is the publication date on this. So this is the fourth volume, finally published in 1999. So all the time I was studying with him, he was publishing these. mainly self-published. There's a company called Wind Bell, but Wind Bell was pretty much something he and a couple of his students organized to print these things up and distribute them. And he used to give these lectures every Saturday in this place called the Young Buddhist Association, which is part of Tokyo University.

[12:40]

And I would go to them and he would just drone on and on about Dogen. He'd just talk about Dogen. and what he was saying really interested me. Some of Dogen was more interesting than others. Nishthima's method was very, I don't know, when I look back on it, kind of odd, because he would just go through the entire show of Bogenzo chronologically, then start again, you know, from beginning to end, and he'd just do lectures over and over on it, you know, changing it a little bit. But I thought... if he's gone to all this trouble to write, to translate all of this Shobo Genzo, I'm going to read it. So I had an hour-long commute every day to work, and I would put these in my backpack, you know, one of them, usually not all four, and just read them on the train. And in doing so, I ended up reading the whole Shobo Genzo...

[13:46]

front to back three times because I just got really interested in it. Once I'd finished it once, I'd started again. I look back at that time now and go, what a nerd. But it was really interesting. I keep looking at my watch because it's like this time is very short to try to get through everything. So what I'd like to do is I'll just... My personal take on Dogen is that he wrote a lot of stuff, obviously, and to me it's much more interesting to look at what Dogen's sort of philosophical attitude was and where he kind of came from, what he was... what he was concerned with. Then to look at these kind of specific things, I know a lot of people get hung up on his ideas about whether monastic practice, bless you, is better than lay practice or not.

[14:48]

That's one of the things that bothers a lot of scholars because he seems to, if you look at his stuff chronologically, have started off saying that lay practice was just fine and then seems to have ended his life saying lay practitioners were crap and you had to be a monastic, although I think that's not really true. But I thought I'd give you, like, I went through Shobogenzo over the last couple days trying to remember which were my favorite bits of it. So for those of you who are interested, I've written down my little Shobogenzo mixtape, you know, if you want to make yourself a mixtape of Shobogenzo. These are the ones that I think are important, and I'm going to try to sort of encapsulate why very quickly. The first two are just kind of... are just sort of almost distillations of the entire piece, which is Bendoa and Genzhou Koan.

[15:52]

Bendoa is usually... The Tanahashi translation calls it On the Endeavor of the Way. Nishijima called it A Talk About Pursuing the Truth. And somebody else who I can't remember, maybe Dan Layton, called it The Wholehearted Way. But it's a rather long, it's one of the longest bits in Shobo Genzo. And it was originally, I think, written as a separate piece. Genjo Koan is also known as Actualizing the Fundamental Point or the Realized Universe. And that one also kind of gives you... a really short, brief version. And I don't know, do you guys, probably during practice periods or something, you might chant, did you chant Genjo Kohan? Yeah, it's kind of a common chanting one. Uji is another one I like a lot, which is... um, also known as, uh, the time being in the Tanahashi translation or being time in the Nishijima translation. And it's, it kind of, it goes into Dogen's view of time, which is rather, um, unique.

[16:56]

Because he, as the title implies, he, uh, he puts being and time together. U is being and G is, uh, is time. And it, um, An idea that there is no time without being... We usually sort of think of ourselves as these objects who move on through time, but in Dogen's way of thinking, we are expressions of time itself, which is kind of cool. But there's no time machines in that one, which is a disappointment. Immo is the one I talked about... or one of the ones I talked about last year, which Tanahashi calls thusness and which Nishijima calls it. Inmo is just a kind of a Chinese word that just means it. It's a very vague sort of term. And to me, that is... I-N-M-O. Sometimes it's I-M-M-O because Japanese can be transliterated in different ways.

[17:58]

And to me, that is... I titled my talk last year, or maybe it was the year before, about Inmo, Dogen's concept of God, because I feel like what he's referring to, by using the word that Nishima translates again and again in his version as it, is just God. I don't know how Tanahashi translates it exactly. I haven't read it. Let's see. Muchu Setsumu is another good one, called either... within a dream, expressing a dream or preaching a dream in a dream, which as a fan of Philip K. Dick, I love. You guys know Philip K. Dick? Uh, it's, um, Nishijima's, uh, commentary on it. He says, we can't grasp the present moment intellectually. Uh, and it kind of goes into that idea of what the present moment is and why we can't conceive of the present moment. Um, Let me do these really fast because I kind of like to find out what sort of questions we have.

[19:05]

Jinzu is another one. It's called Miracles or Mystical Power. Tanashi calls it Miracles and kind of gets into the idea of whether or not such a thing as a miracle or the possession of mystical power is possible or not. Shinjin Inga is one that is printed on the Tassahara T-shirts, the ones that have the four. characters on them, that's Shinjin Inga, which Nishijima translates as deep belief in cause and effect, or Tanahashi translates as identifying with cause and effect. That goes into his belief that there is nothing that occurs in the universe that isn't governed by or can't be seen in terms of cause and effect. A lot of religions speculate that God or somebody can intervene and negate cause and effect. But the Dogen was very adamant that this was not possible.

[20:11]

Shoji is a good one. It's really tiny. It's only a page long. And it's birth and death in Tanahashi, or life and death. But it talks about how birth and death are occurring in every moment. La-di-da, just a couple other ones I like. I have tons of these. Another one that would be highly recommended to look into. Oh, this one I like because I'm not sure I understand it. It's called Shinji no Go, which is Karma in the Three Times, and it's one of the few that Tanahashi and Nishijima both translate the title of in the same way. And it presents the view of of karma, this whole idea of karma, that there is a kind of immutable cause and effect that even occurs in the realm of moral action. And gives the idea that even if the effect of something that one of us does isn't apparent at the moment, it will become apparent later on as it ripens.

[21:20]

I remember having a conversation with Nishijima once in which I told him, We had this bizarre, one of these bizarre dreams that people have when they do too much zazen, in which I felt like all cause and effect was simultaneous. And he said, that's exactly what Dogen was trying to say. So, although he also says cause and effect occur sometimes in widely spread time. Okay, now I'm going to stop and see if we can do questions and answers for the next, I don't know, seven minutes or something. I know that wasn't long. So what does Dogen have to do with what we're doing here? Yeah, I know. It's hard to do. It's kind of the basis. I guess I zipped through that introduction a little too fast to make that clear. But the fact of people studying Dogen's work is...

[22:21]

probably why Tassahara exists now, which is that people like Shinryu Suzuki now had access to Dogen's work emphasizing this idea that zazen was the fundamental thing. Because you have to remember, if you look at Crooked Cucumber, Shinryu Suzuki's original sort of brief from the Soto Shu was to go to San Francisco and kind of officiate ceremonies and things for the immigrant Japanese community. But he had read Dogen and he had met Kodo Suwaki who also read Dogen and he thought that isn't what I'm here for. I'm here to teach anybody who wants to this Zazen stuff. So I think it's really critical. Although when you read Dogen it might seem kind of abstract and it might be very hard Dogen's hard to read.

[23:22]

So sometimes it's hard to get the connection. Although he has things like Fukan Zazengi, another one I highly recommend, which is usually translated as recommending zazen to all, which is an important thing. Sorry, I went through that too fast. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I remember asking Nishijima the question. He just thought, he said that he thought people in Dogen's time weren't ready to understand Dogen's, which is kind of the same, which is, I think, maybe saying kind of the same thing, because the society hadn't gone through enough of what it needed to go through for the things that Dogen put forth to be understood. So, But yeah, you can see him as being very postmodern.

[24:24]

I mean, he deconstructs everything, you know, including Buddhism itself. So yeah, I think perhaps we're ready for it. One of the stories, one of the theories I've heard of why Dogen's work was lost for so long is that the teachers who came along after him in Sotoshu didn't want to talk about Dogen because, quite frankly, they didn't understand it. Um, and, and so they didn't, they, they kind of put this stuff away and hoped nobody would really look at it, uh, because, uh, because they, they didn't want to be asked what it meant, you know. So I, I think, I think various changes and things have happened to where Dogen is now accessible to, to us where he might not have been 800 years ago. First of all, just on a practical level, I know the dining room crew doesn't need this room until 5, so maybe we can go a little bit over. I don't know what the rules are, but I'm happy to go as long as we need to.

[25:27]

And then I have two questions. One is what did Jogan have to say about Zazen, the practice of Zazen? Like, you know, what are we supposed to do when we sit and face the wall? And why do we sit there and face the wall? And also, if you could go into maybe a little bit more I don't know if this is fair, I'm not asking two questions, I'm cheating, but a little bit... Okay, yeah, good. A little bit more about Shobo Genzo Genmo and what exactly you mean when you say... Okay. Okay, well, I'll do the first one. Actually, I wrote some notes about the first question because it was one of the things I decided it wasn't time for. Nishima had pulled out of Shobo Genzo what he... thought were Dogen's four essential points about Zazen. And whenever, not whenever he'd do a lecture, but very often when he did a lecture, the lecture was the four points of Zazen lecture. So I got to hear this I don't know how many dozen times over the course of studying with him and attending his lecture.

[26:34]

And the four things he points out which don't actually I don't think they appear anywhere in Shobo Genzo is as like a list of four. But they appear they appear Each one appears numerous times in Shogo Genza whenever he talks about zazen. One is hisshiryo. Hisshiryo is non-thinking or not thinking or something different from thinking. It's kind of a funny word. Shiryo means more, if you actually look it up in a dictionary, it means more what we think of as not thinking. I'm blanking on the English word. Sirio is more like cognating. You know, we tend to think of thinking in two parts. There's a sort of thinking that just happens. that just bubbles up from your subconscious and occurs. Shiryu is more the other type of thinking where you actually take something that's bubbled up from your subconscious and play with it and think about it and do that.

[27:41]

So that's what it means. And he is a strong negation which is like the ill in illegal or the immoral. It's that sort of a strong negation of it. So... avoiding thinking, which means sitting upright, so actually taking the posture, so that zazen isn't just a mental practice. It isn't an arbitrary posture that we take in order to work on our brains, which is, I think, the way a lot of meditation tends to be taught, that the posture is just whatever. and we're here to work on our minds, which is why you have those weird lean-back meditation chairs that they sell in the back of Shambhala-san and stuff. But zazen is actually a physical practice. Shinjin datsuraku, which is dropping off body and mind, is the third point, and that comes from the famous story of, probably most of you have heard it, maybe some of you haven't, that...

[28:54]

Dogen apparently when he was studying with Ryujin, Tendo Nyojo, heard Tendo Nyojo say, now is the time to drop off body and mind. And that was what sparked off his so-called, you know, Satori experience or whatever it was, you know, whatever you want to call it, his big awakening. And dropping off body and mind, Nishijima used to explain by saying we tend to divide our understanding of the world into matter and mind or mental phenomenon or spiritual phenomenon. So there's that kind of nebulous side of life which can't be touched or... expressed very well, but we know exists. And then there's the other part, which is your fingernails and your toes and the rocks and trees and things. And the zazen was a way to drop off both sides, which isn't exactly getting rid of them.

[29:57]

It's seeing that there isn't a difference between the two. So you sit with the kind of understanding of body and mind are dropped away. And the fourth one is shikantaza. Shikantaza is that thing that they teach here and everybody goes, what the hell is shikantaza? Because it just means just sitting. And it's, to me, as a partisan person, it's the most essential sort of real form of meditation you could possibly get because there's no... There's no goal to it. You are directly sitting. You are experiencing. When you're doing zazen, you're not doing zazen to have some experience. You're doing zazen to do zazen. So the experience is itself complete. So those are what he would say the four essential things are. As for immo, that's a harder one.

[30:59]

I wonder if I have it. I wonder if I even have it. because quoting it would be easier than just trying to do it from memory. But he says a lot of things. I'm trying to, let's see what I can come up with from memory rather than trying to look things up in a book. He says, we are the eyes and ears, or something like that, or the mind and body it uses to experience the universe, you know, this it. He goes on and on about what, you know, he says... unnameable thing and he gives its characteristics and one of which is that. And to me that sounds like a description of what I understand God to be. I feel the latest book that I'm writing is going to be called There Is No God and He Is Your Creator and it's based on something that's been kind of

[32:01]

in my mind the whole time I've been practicing this stuff, which is that I think God is part of this practice. And to eliminate it from this practice does it a kind of disservice. It makes it seem like a kind of a cozy little psychological exercise. But I think it's much bigger than that. Dogen will say things like, the whole earth is the same as a human being. A human body contains the whole earth or contains the whole universe, which is a weird thing. And I don't think he's just trying to be poetic or say something inspiring or something like that. I think he's trying to describe his real experience in sort of maybe the more deeper moments of practice.

[33:02]

that the whole universe is us, is all of us. And to me that gets into the whole God thing. Yes? If the entire universe is the Dharma body of the self, or like... Yeah, something like that. That's his original question. If we have Buddha nature, why don't we realize it? Why do we practice it? So what... Well... All of Shobo Genzo is kind of his answer to that. That was his question to start with, and so he wrote this massive book to try to answer that question. But what it kind of comes down to is almost that without practice, you can't understand even what that question means. You know, you... although we are endowed with it by our very nature, somehow we need to find it.

[34:09]

And it's because you have the question to begin with, or Dogen had the question to begin with, tells you that there's something missing, or either that or that the question is wrong, that we don't have... We don't have this. Which would be another way to go about it. Maybe Dogen's wrong. Maybe there's nothing. Maybe I could spend my whole life practicing and then realize that it was just a big waste of time. And it's difficult. My answer to that was embodied in the two teachers I had. both Tim McCarthy and Nishima Roshi had done this practice for decades and had been very seriously committed to it and were able to convey something that went beyond anything I'd ever experienced from people who hadn't done that practice.

[35:12]

So I thought, there must be something to this. But it's also something you could easily miss. Zach will vouch for this. Tim McCarthy, you know, most people who meet him just think he's a goofball. He's like this eccentric goofball who makes funny noises. Like, wah. Nishijima comes across to a lot of people as just this kind of cranky old man with a lot of opinions. And I've heard a lot of people dismiss him that way. But... But sitting with them and looking at them and getting to know them, I thought, no, there's something else. Although I think both of those assessments are kind of true. There's something else. There's something deeper than that. So answering the question of why is it necessary to practice is the only possible answer I seem to be able to give is you have to practice to find out. And And that's what makes this kind of difficult because you can't sell this zazen practice very easily.

[36:17]

There's no reward at the end. Well, maybe there's a reward at the end of it. I don't know. I feel that it hasn't been a waste of time. And I feel that it has been necessary. I don't think it's any understanding I have what... what little it is, could have come about in any other way. So I don't know. So the answer is I don't know. That's the short answer. Sorry for making it so long. So how was he received when he was alive? These are the teachers who were around him. Well, it's not his. My impression of the history between Dogen and our time of what went on is a little bit murky.

[37:20]

So a lot of it's kind of speculation, even what I just said. My impression is that the teachers who were alive during the time probably got it and were more willing to share it. And it was kind of the later generations that sort of lost it. Dogen in his time was fairly popular. I mean, he wasn't the biggest name in the business, but he was popular enough to have, how many hundred? You know, he had a couple hundred disciples at any given time, you know, living with him. I don't know if that many lived with him in Aheji at any one time, but over the course of his lifetime, there were several hundred people who came and studied with him. So he was fairly popular. Whether they understood him or not... You know, who knows? And also the thing about Dogen, I think, that's important is I think our contemporary understanding of Dogen is valid.

[38:23]

There's a sort of tendency with religious stuff. to idealize the past, you know, and to say that there was this golden age a long time ago, and it's even in some of the chants, right? We do, you know, may the Dharma be renewed in the age of decline, you know, which is just like, you know, enshrines this romanticism of this golden age of the past. But I doubt there was any great golden age of the past. And I was thinking the other day that really the thing that makes ancient stuff valuable is because something that's been around long enough has had a chance to kind of be refined and defined its place. It doesn't indicate that it was pristine and perfect when it was first put down. So I think our contemporary understanding of Dogen is valid. I don't think every contemporary piece of writing about Dogen that I've come across, a lot of it doesn't do much for me. personally, and I don't know if it's valid from another standpoint or not.

[39:28]

But I think a lot of it is, sort of looking at it as psychology and all of that. You know, it's crazy for me to sometimes think how much time has passed. He's writing this stuff in the 1200s, and 800 years had to pass. If you think about, you know, now, if something that was laid down now lasted 800 years, I mean, Star Trek is set in a future... 300 years from now, right? So that's what we imagine 300 years from now. This is like more than twice that long. You know, there's a passage in Dogen where he says something about, he compares something to being like an iron rail 100 miles long. And when I first read that, I thought, oh, railroad. And then I thought, 1200, there was no such thing as a railroad. You know, that's how long ago there was. There weren't railroads, you know. So we live in a very different time. from the time he lived in. And a lot more research and stuff has gone on to understanding the world we live in.

[40:28]

And maybe it's time for Dogen. Time for Dogen. I'm going to start a children's TV show called Time for Dogen. Anyone else? Is everybody sick of it? Okay, we can close up. Thank you for listening. I think I'm scheduled to give another one of these, but I don't know when. And if anybody has kind of suggestions, I would love to hear it, because sometimes I don't know what people want to hear about. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge 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.

[41:33]

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