Wild Fox Zen
I’m enjoying some post-sesshin work time, preparing an outline for the upcoming online practice period focusing daily life and mutual polishing. For more, click here, or contact [email protected] with questions.
As promised we worked with the passage from Dogen’s Extensive Study and had some good Zen fun while waking up at 3:30am and sitting much of the day. We’re a small group and the people who are here are here because they want to be here.That clears the energy field enormously. Seems like that would always be the case – but it isn’t. Anyway, when I offer a focus, gosh, they really pick it up.
The piece that’s on my mind now is about how Dogen defines extensive study, the “…study and penetration of the ultimate limit … is ‘I always care for this.'” See more of the passage below in my previous post or click here for the whole fascicle.
The ultimate limit manifests in response to our caring for the details of our lives. Freedom from the world of this and that comes in embracing this and that. Planning a meal, cutting the onion, heating the oil. This is what we’ll be doing in the 90-day training.
Bielefeldt, the translator, notes that the character that he translates as “to care for” could also be rendered, “’to entertain,’ ‘be intimate with;’ but might also be understood as ‘to take seriously.'”
Katagiri Roshi translated the line as “I am always close to this.”
To study and penetrate the ultimate limit also to study and be engulfed by the ultimate limit. Zen flips around like this and that.
When we care for the ultimate limit, we are intimate with it. It is so close that we are the host and entertain our guest. Seriously.
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