Genjokoan 11: Shaking Off Enlightenment

We’re moving into the last couple weeks of the 100 days. By the way, I’m planning to offer another virtual training in the fall and am exploring some internet options for a video conference class. Thoughts on how to do that would be appreiciated (please use the email on the sidebar).

For now we’re wrapping up our work with the following passage from Dogen’s Genjokoan (variously translated, I’m inclined to “Unfolding Truth” these days):

There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped. We endlessly keep expressing the ungraspable trace of realization.

Old guy Bokusan has this in his commentary, “A trace of enlightenment is the boundary of realization. Let it go. If you say that you are finally enlightened, the front door is locked with a golden chain. If you abide in the place where you are enlightened, going beyond is blocked…. It is a great disease if the dharma body has a trace, or if enlightenment has a shadow. So it is said, ‘A cloudless, blue sky still needs to be hit with a stick.'”

The dharma body disease refered to here is from the Book of Serenity, “Case 11: Yunmen’s Two Sickness.” The commentary breaks it into three sicknesses (Zen people have never been able to count very well, like Suzuki’s two most important words in Zen, “Not always so”).

1. Going away before arrival, likened to searching for a donkey while riding on a donkey.
2. Attachment after arrival, likened to getting on the donkey but being unwilling to get off the donkey.
3. Penetrating through, relying on nothing, likened to pulling weeds from a wild field.

Even Ikkyu left tracks in the sand, the mark of the tail erasing the footsteps: “I don’t remember making a mistake called enlightenment.”

Bokusan continues, “Because enlightenment must not remain, you grind it off completely, until there is not even a speck of enlightenment. When you reach this point of ‘no stink of enlightenment’ where there is no trace, you vow with great determination to let the absence of enlightenment continue long, long, long like a single rail of iron for myriad miles.”