Knowing Without Touching

I’ve got a couple things for you today. First, a lovely, evocative poem from today’s Writer’s Almanac, “Durum Wheat,” with some “forgetting the self” overtones. And that’s the second offering – some study resources related to what I mentioned a few days ago – Sen’ne said that “forgetting the self” was “knowing without touching things,” a reference to a line from Hongzhi’s “Zazenshin” poem. Below that you’ll find Dogen’s comments on Hongzhi’s poem.

Dogen suggests that knowing without touching things (a.k.a., forgetting the self) is (among other things), “sitting and breaking skin born of mother” – a wonderful call to wholeheartedness. Enjoy.

“Durum wheat”

by Lisa Martin-Demoor

Memory at its finest lacks corroboration
—no photographs, no diaries—
nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.
Just because you’ve got this idea
of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads
of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires —
just because somewhere in your memory
there’s a rust-coloured pulse
taking its place among canola yellow
and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures—
just because you want to
doesn’t mean you can
build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.

Someone tells you you’ve imagined it,
that gash across the ripe belly of summer,
and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.
Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,
to escape the heat, out the Pontiac’s backseat window
you just remembered it that way
because you preferred the better version.

Someone tells you this.
But what can they know of faith?
To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.
This innocence that can’t be proved: what the child saw
of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.

You have to go there while there’s still time.
Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in the wind.
While you’re still young enough to remember
a flame planted along a road. While you’re still
seeing more than there is to see.

Excerpt from Hongzhi’s “Zazenshin:”
Essential function of buddha after buddha,

Functioning essence of ancestor after ancestor

It knows without touching things;
It illumines without facing objects.

Knowing without touching things,
Its knowing is inherently subtle….

And Dogen from his commentary on “Zazenshin:”“It knows without touching things.” “Knowing” does not mean perception; for perception is of little measure. It does not mean understanding; for understanding is artificially constructed. Therefore, this “knowing” is “not touching things”, and “not touching things” is “knowing.” [Such “knowing”] should not be measured as universal knowledge; it should not be categorized as self-knowledge. This “not touching things” means “When they come in the light, I hit them in the light; when they come in the dark, I hit them in the dark.” It means “sitting and breaking the skin born of mother.”