Second (or Third) Enlightenment?

Here’s a comment from my last post that I’d like to post a comment about … so we’re already in the realm of two or three heads! Continue reading at your own peril.

Dosho,

In [“Valley Sounds, Mountain Colors”] Dogen talked of the ‘second enlightenment’ of Master Kyogen Chikan and Master Reiun Shigon.

Nishijima Roshi interprets this as those Masters’ attainment of understanding of the entire philosophical system of Buddhism. What do you think of this idea?

Is the ‘essential inquiry’ of which you speak a means to directly clarify Buddhist philosophy in this way?

Can you explain the method of enquiry in detail?

Regards,

Harry.

Harry and all who didn’t listen to the above warning,

First off, rather than concern yourself with second enlightenment, I encourage you to focus on first enlightenment! Nevertheless, I looked up “second enlightenment” with a link Harry provided to Nishijima Roshi’s blog and found this:

By reading Shobogenzo I recognize clearly that in the case of Master Dogen he insists that to practice Zazen itself is just enlightenment.

But at the same time in “Keisei-sanshiki” (9), Master Dogen describes another kind of enlightenments on Master Kyogen Chikan and Master Reiun Shigon.

Therefore I recognize the two kinds of enlightenment to exist, and so I indicate the practice of zazen as the first enlightenment, and the latter one as the second enlightenment.

The second enlightenment is the perfect understanding the whole Buddhist philosophical System completely.

Now, Nishijima Roshi is a venerable old priest whom I deeply appreciate for his translation of Shobogenzo, however, I respectfully disagree.

First, the notion that Dogen conflated practice and enlightenment only goes back to Menzan in the 18th century who reformulated Soto Zen to kick out koan elements and impose his idea of the oneness of practice and enlightenment – apparently to distinguish Soto from Rinzai and Obaku Zen so that Soto might survive.

And although “Bendowa” might be read with Dogen conflating practice and enlightenment, Shobogenzo in its entirety need not be read in that way at all. Dogen plays with many relationships between practice and enlightenment. That practice and enlightenment are not separate as people commonly believe does not mean that they’re one as people commonly believe.

This issue – the relationship between practice and enlightenment – is important for actual practice and that’s why I’m wandering into tall weeds here. If you believe in the mystical union of zazen and enlightenment, you aren’t really sitting or enlightened – just a dead horse confirming a theory. Your zazen might even become a fetish based on magical thinking.

My study and practice with Katagiri Roshi and since has convinced me that Dogen wasn’t a big theory guy. Dogen was a jazz man. He just wholeheartedly blew his horn, using and then going beyond the confines of any theoretical box. And it is in that sense that practice and enlightenment are one.

Hee-Jin Kim, in his book (click that and you’ll get a Google Book except but unfortunately not the part I’m dealing with below) about Dogen and meditation, finds the language Katagiri Roshi was always groping for. In Keep Me In Your Heart A While I paraphrase it like this (you gotta take your time with this or it’ll seem like jibberish):

The oneness of practice-enlightenment is not a merger in mystical union;
nor complementary sides of the same reality;
nor are they in the relationship of periphery and center;
nor like the surface and core; not a transformation of one into the other;
not like seed and fruit;
not like cause and effect;
not thinking and not- thinking;
not worldly and ultimate truth;
not antecedent and consequence;
not means and end;
and not nullification or denial of the differences between the two.
The oneness of practice and enlightenment is not “everything is Buddha, everything is practice.” It is not “original enlightenment” as it is usually understood with the concomitant denial of the importance of karma, lack of concern for other’s welfare, and enlightenment.

If practice and enlightenment are in none of the above relationships, how are they related? Like two foci in intimate conversation in actual practice.

Second, about enlightenment, experientially, it is described by Dogen as the 10,000 things advancing to confirm the self. Several hundred years earlier, Dongshan described it as “You are not it, but in truth it is you.”

Certainly there are moments of synthesis in practice when the Buddha’s teaching comes together and the matrix of mind and heart lights up. And that’s what those moments are – not enlightenment.

As for a perfect understanding of the complete Buddhist philosophical system – which one? There are a whole bunch of Buddhist philosophical systems, designed for various times and places and people. There are numerous points of apparent contradiction.

Anyway, Kyogen and Reiun don’t describe their experiences in that way – check it out in Kaz Tanahahi’s Enlighenment Unfolds, p. 59.

But if you have a theory about Dogen’s zazen and enlightenment that doesn’t fit with all the enlightenment stories Dogen relates and praises, then you might want to come up with a stretch theory to make sense out of that contradiction. It looks to me like a dog with three heads – you have to keep adding heads to cover the incongruencies in your theory.

And that seems like more than enough for one post. I’ll come back sometime to Harry’s questions about inquiry.