The Goldenness Of The Earth, The Sweet Milk Of The Long River

Here’s Bodhi on his one year birthday – yesterday.

I just came in from beginning to get the beds ready for planting – in about a month. Digging in the earth in the spring is so aromatic. Ahhh! The great earth’s goldenness arising in tune with the rotting of last year’s growth and all the many years before.

Anyway, GS did some wonderful transcribing work and so I have a Katagiri Roshi offering for you today on this theme. Here it is:

The last sentence of the Genjokoan says, “The wind of Buddhism makes manifest the great earth’s goldenness and makes ripen the sweet milk of the long rivers.”

In the Genjokoan Dogen Zenji mentions about outlook of the world and human life systematically. Even though this chapter is very short, one by one he mentions about his outlook on the world and human beings. How we should understand the world and human beings?

And then the last sentence he mentions like this. Completely beyond the theoretical explanation of the world he mention exactly like this, “The wind of Buddhism makes manifest the great earth’s goldenness.”

Dogen Zenji mentions that we have to accept the gold of the earth and built the human world on the earth’s goldenness, accept the rivers as sweet milk and taste the rivers, taste the rivers, as the sweet milk, and then taste and build up human life.

If you look at the human world it is difficult for us to believe that the world is golden or that the river is sweet milk. The earth seems contaminated under your feet. We have misgivings about the universe disabled by human activities and human cultural accumulations. Now everything seems to be contaminated, disabled, finally ruined. Everybody is very scared. In terms of our understanding, if you see human life in the world lots of miserable events happens, killing, fighting each other very easily, etc. Human life is completely devaluated.

In that present situation, Dogen Zenji mentions like this, “The earth is golden the rivers are sweet. We have to accept the golden of the earth, we have to taste the rivers as sweet milk.” It means that we have to accept the whole world, what you can see through your eyes, through your ears, through your five skandhas, and build up the world.

Anyway, not in the contaminated earth, in the golden earth human life should be accepted as sweet milk. We have to establish and build up our life as sweet milk. We have to build up beautiful human life. As long as we exist in this world we can not take a nap. Always in this world whatever you feel, we have to make every possible effort to build up the human world.

But the common understanding is “We do, we have done many things, we are doing many things in the future. But something happens around us, so lets leave the rest to fate.” I don’t think this is appropriate way of human life. If you have such an understanding of how to live in this world, I think your boat is always drifting in the ocean. But a true human life is not drifting in the ocean. We have to sail across in the ocean of human life.

The Goldenness of the Earth, The Sweet Milk of the Long River