Is This Body Great Or Small

Retreived my bike from the repair shop today and road around Bald Eagle Lake for the first time in a couple weeks – a very smooth and cool zip. Minnesota turns golden this time of year as you can see above.

This week in the 100-days practice we begin to focus on the culminating passages from Dogen’s Genjokoan, including this call to realization:

When a person attains realization,

it is like the moon reflecting on the water….
In order to investigate the significance
of the length and shortness of time,
we should consider whether the water
is great or small
and grasp with discernment the width
or narrowness of the moon in the sky.

Investigate! Some confuse Soto Zen practice with a luke-warm form of shamata based on a half-baked belief that everything is already perfect. Hardly and bah humbug!

Dogen here calls us to see for ourselves.

In the previous section, we looked at the firewood and ash simile, addressing birth and death in terms of time. Here Dogen says that if we want to understand time – our fleeting life and impending death – look at being, not abstractly, but intimately clarifying this dewdrop life from the inside. All this foreshadows Dogen’s work, Uji, or BeingTime – foci that are inseparable and intimately related.

But here “water” refers to this body and mind and all our ancient, twisted karma. Is your body itself, great or small?

Of course, the body is great, connected with all the 10,000 things. And of course, in the face of a Universe with a trillion stars, the bodies is very small. So if you say “My body is great,” you miss how small the body is. If you say, “My body is small,” you miss how great it is. If you say both great and small, you are like an eel wiggling. If you say neither, you sidestep the issues in an ignoble manner.

In the face of this pointed question, “Is the body great or small?” (or any true koan) ideas fabricated by bifurcating consciousness miss it – they lack the power to embody the great earth’s goldeness. So we must go beyond the bifurcating consciousness. You can’t do this by thinking any more than you can wash mud with mud.

When Yaoshan went to Shitou and asked for his compassionate guidance, Shitou gave it to him saying, “This way won’t do, not this way won’t do, neither this way nor that way won’t due at all. How about you?”

“Dang,” said Yaoshan, “you are one whacked-out dude. I quit,” (more or less) and then went to Mazu for several years before coming back to resume his work with Shitou.

I’ve asked the students in the 100 Days practice to come to the next session or webinar with their best question about the question of great or small (and also, to give the moon on this full moon night its due, wide or narrow).

How about you?

Is This Body Great or Small