Wild Fox Zen
For my sweet 16th birthday, my oldest sister (I’ve got five) gave me Alan Watts’ Way of Zen. I devoured it and then immediately put it on my bookshelf for about five years and had a freaky kind of feeling whenever I’d see it there. The message I received was that Zen was about destroying the self and it scared the hell out of me.
Now in the 100 days practice session we’re investigating and practicing this part of the Genjokoan:
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken.
In terms of the flow of the text, this metaphor follows Dogen’s presentation of firewood and ash (see earlier posts – click here). What’s the connection?
Firewood and ash, as one person said during the last webinar, is like the Halloween of Zen because it calls for such radical one-doing moment by moment. Die sitting, die standing.
As we dip our toes into the actual practice of firewood and ash, the push back often comes from a fear of annihilation that ranges from barely conscious to painfully obvious. I discussed this same fear, by the way, in Keep Me In Your Heart Awhile, “Bow is Like a Rock in Your Heart” as an underlying barrier that creates resistance to letting go of ourselves and completely bowing (and in the act of many of the forms of Soto Zen).
It also appears in zazen or what Katagiri Roshi calls “the kinetic art of zazen.”
Kinetic art? Merriam Webster has this for kinetic: “…of or relating to the motion of material bodies and the forces and energy associated therewith.” For more on kinetic art, click here.
Just-one-doing zazen (aka, nonthinking) is full participation, nothing left out. It’s like holding a sparkler and swinging your arm around as fast as you can. The individual sparkler isn’t destroyed when it participates in creating the optical illusion of the circle any more than the moment when it creates the optical illusion of just being one sparkler at rest.
Dogen seems to be offering some solace for fear of annihilation from fully participating in this one great life by encouraging us to clearly and accurately understand how the whole works. The moon doesn’t get wet. The water isn’t broken.
Enlightenment does not destroy the person as the moon does not shatter the water.
Significantly, Dogen also addresses this issue in Zazenshin (the needle point of zazen):
Bielefeldt renders the passage like this:
There is someone in “nonthinking”, and this someone maintains us. Although it is we who are sitting “fixedly”, [our sitting] is not merely “thinking”: it presents itself as sitting “fixedly”. Although sitting “fixedly” is sitting “fixedly”, how could it “think” of sitting “fixedly”?
And here’s the same passage in it’s Shasta Abbey version:
There is a someone involved in not deliberately trying to think about something, and that someone is maintaining and supporting an I. Even though being ever so still is synonymous with that I, meditation is not merely an I thinking about something; it is the I offering up its being as still and awesome as a mountain.2 Even though its being ever so still is being ever so still, how can its being ever so still possibly think about being ever so still?
This “someone” is quite a stinker, like the dewdrop illuminated by the moon, like the sparkler flowing like a circle. There’s really nothing to fear.
And here’s one Dosho Port’s encouragement for how to practice with this from Keep Me in Your Heart:
Reflecting on Dogen Zenji’s teaching can educate consciousness and be solace at those times that we fear the moon. Making fear itself the practice through thorough intimacy with the bodily sensations of fear is actualizing the moon in a dewdrop.
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