What is Great Practice?

I found the discussion following my last post about Jiryu’s book, Two Shores of Zen: An American Monk’s Japan, (oh, go ahead, click and buy it right away!) quite heart warming in the midst of this cold Minnesota winter.  Jiryu’s last chapters were the most powerful in the book for me and I was riveted to the couch as he worked through multiple conundrums – seeing the light and shadow of the just-one-doing monastery, the urge to go and the urge to stay, finding home here or there, and starting to make some meaning from his pilgrimage. 

His process helped me to digest something left over from my experience in Japan many years ago so I am very grateful to Jiryu.

Today I want to take up the issue of breakthroughs, kenshos, satori, the Big E, etc. 

Katagiri Roshi often said, “Of course, enlightenment is important for us.” Why take the Buddh (Awake) out of Buddhism?

But what is enlightenment? First what it isn’t – a individual personal mental experience, despite the fact that it is often packaged in that way, just because we moderns reduce most things to that. The thirst for such is like wild fox slobber – once you get it in your mouth it can take twenty years to spit it out.

Jiryu does a nice job of presenting the idealization of breakthroughs – if only (and only if) I could get it, then it’d all be okay – especially through the character of Keishi, an American monk that Jiryu encounters who argues that there is no Zen in America and only a few masters have “it” in Japan.

There’s a sense that the Keishi character is a wild fox, transmigrating without getting anywhere, making the same argument again and again, deluding young monks everywhere with an enticing fantasy that he himself has not yet verified.

Dogen takes this issue up in his Daishugyo, Great Practice, fascicle of Shobogenzo, a commentary on the Wild Fox koan and I’ll be working it with the community in Anchorage next Sunday. The central question addressed in the koan – “Is a person of great practice free from karma?”

Here’s the whole Wild Fox story: 
When Baizhang would give teachings to the assembly an old man would often appear and listen to his Dharma talks. The old man usually left after the talks, but one day he remained behind. Baizhang asked, “Who are you?” The old man said, “I am not actually a human being. In ancient times, at the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I lived and taught on this mountain. One day a student asked, ‘Does a person who has cultivated great practice still fall into cause and effect?’ I said to him, ‘No, such a person does not.’ Because of this I was reborn as a wild fox for five hundred lifetimes. Venerable Master, please say a turning word and free me from this body of a wild fox.” Then he asked Baizhang, “Does a person who has cultivated great practice still fall into cause and effect?” Baizhang said, “Do not ignore cause and effect.” Immediately the old man had a great realization. 

One thing about shape-shifting folklore foxes that you need to know is that they shift their shape to appeal to their victim’s  delusion soft-spot. In folklore they often they appear as alluring women to men prone to flights of grandiosity.

Here, though, the fox appears to the Zen master right in his area of vulnerability – “Is the person of great practice free from karma (i.e., suffering)?”

Today I just want to make one fox-tail point about this – Dogen’s title, Daishugyo, often translated as Great Practice. Looking at the characters themselves we find that Dai means great – so great it can’t be measured. Shu is to “govern oneself, conduct oneself well.” Gyo is a radical that refers to “going” or “action,” originally referring to the action of moving on pathways that connected villages.  

Shugyo, then, is much more than “practice” – more like the refined activity of interconnection. Mutual polishing.  

Is a person of great refined activity through interconnection free from suffering? 

How could such a person be pulled out of the fabric?