Leaping

Above is our doggie Bodhi doing some leaping through the field. And below is a provisional translation of the third line of the Genjokoan:

Since the buddha way intrinsically leaps from abundance and deficiency, there is arising and perishing, delusion and realization, living beings and buddhas.

The issue here may not be so much about transcendence or immanence (as I suggested in the last post about this line a week ago) but about leaping intrinsically from every flipping thing. It’s about living an alive life instead of tripping along like a half dead horse.

“I came that they might have life and have it to the full,” says Jesus in one of the Gospels.

Or like Bonnie Myotai Treace once said, “You can’t live a bunny life and write tiger poems”

Last night in the Dogen Study Group we digested this line of Genjokoan some more with a new twist. My brother, adept at Japanese language and especially legal Japanese, argues that the literal translation for “abundance and deficiency” is really “abundance-not.”

So “…the buddha way intrinsically leaps from not-abundance….”

Other translators (and the commentators that I have access too) seem to agree that “abundance” refers to when all things are the buddhadharma (the first line of Genjokoan) and that “not” or “deficiency” refers when all dharmas are not-self there is no delusion, no realization, etc. (the second line of the Genjokoan). So the buddha way has two faces – abundance (the full flowering of the 10,000 things) and deficiency (the utter and complete lack of anything).

Another interpretation, however, is that Dogen is saying something else – he’s suggesting a third way, not at all hindered by the first two, very much like thinking, not-thinking, and nonthinking. The buddha way, Dogen might be saying, leaps from not-abundance (akin to not-thinking) and is non-abundance, non-deficiency.

Or as Katagiri Roshi once said, “Each thing has the virtuous power of being free from itself.”

This is really humbling. The world is not doing anything to us. Instead, “…flowers fall when we cling to them. Weeds grow when we dislike them.”

More quickly than we can snap our fingers, we make our world. When we see the world through the lens of clinging, we see flowers falling. When we see the world through the lens of dislike, we see weeds.

And as Wild Fox student Gary once said, “The universe seems to be okay with that.”

How about you?