Practice is not a Private Mental Experience

40 degrees and snowing now in White Bear!

When all dharmas are of the Buddha‑dharma, there is illusion and enlightenment, practice, birth and death, buddhas and sentient beings.

A friend of many years came by last night to install a new “programmable” thermostat and have dinner. Although the installation went well – his part – setting the program didn’t – my part. The day and year just wouldn’t change. Maybe it’s the unit, maybe it’s my lack of mind-melding skill with programmable technology. I’ll have my almost-12 -year-old son look at it later.

That didn’t dampen the evening at all, however. We laughed a lot and talked about laughing a lot with our late master, Katagiri-roshi, while glancing at his picture on the hutch across the room. When my friend and I are together for a while, the flavor of the conversation – telling stories, laughing at our self-justification, gossiping about old friends – is the flavor of all dharmas are the Buddha-dharma.

I’d say we practice together even though we haven’t been in a zendo together for many years.

What is practice?

Often in Western Buddhist discourse, it seems to refer to a private mental experience like being aware or mindful. This doesn’t capture the deeper dimensions of the original term or what’s happening when I talk with my friend.

What does Dogen mean by “practice,” for example, when he uses the term in the first line of the Genjokoan?

Reflecting on this led me to look up the characters that Dogen uses – shu and gyo. Shu is to “govern oneself, conduct oneself well.” Gyo is a radical that refers to “going” or “action.” Together, shugyo is “training, practice, discipline, ascetic practices, discipline.”

Gyo, however, is a very important little word for understanding and practicing Dogen Zen that I’ll just offer just a lttle more about for now by going back to gyo‘s original Chinese meaning. Here’s Peter D. Hershock’s from Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social Virtuosity in Ch’an Buddhism:

“Originally, hsing (Japanese, gyo) had the primary senses of walking or walkways and doing in the sense of working. Indeed, of the twenty or so most common terms incorporating the hsing radical, fully half have the meaning of a road, marketplace, or thoroughfare. In a largely nonvehicular society, walking connects us, establishing and maintaining in the most concrete and daily fashion our ongoing interrelation. No path or thoroughfare proceeds from wilderness or desert to more of the same, but only from family to family, from village to village. Our roads and markets lining them are evidence of the divers manners in which we are continually being led together, the unique ways in which we benefit and share with and in one another’s labor.”

There’s much more in Hershock’s contemplation on all this in his important book – click here for what’s available in Google Books.

Gyo, or practice, in its original sense, then had to do with moving and doing and connecting – with intimacy much more than with an isolated, private experience.

Clearly, then, we cannot practice alone.