Inviting Careful Inquiry: Wholehearted Play Webinar 2

Here’s our second webinar for the 90-day online practice period. Click here. Once it gets rolling, select Video and View. We had some audio issues in the second half of the session and will get those resolved for next time. 

Dogen invites us in this section of the Instructions for the Cook to inquire carefully and study the self intimately in the process of practice itself, in this case in our kitchen work. 

Specifically, Dogen raises an issue that seems a bit odd at first. Inquire in detail, he advises, to the process of cleaning the rice. Do you view your work as washing away the sand or do you hanging on to the rice? Sand and rice refer to that which lacks nutrition and that which is nutritious as well as the mundane and the sacred, the unwholesome and the wholesome, etc. What is the spirit of your actual practice?

This is an example of intimately studying the self. 

Here’s the koan as Dogen presents it in the text: 
When Xuefeng resided at Dongshan [monastery], he served as cook. One day when he was sifting rice [master] Dongshan asked him, “Are you sifting the sand and removing the rice, or sifting the rice and removing the sand?” Xuefeng said, “Sand and rice are simultaneously removed.” Dongshan asked, “What will the great assembly eat?” Xuefeng overturned the bowl. Dongshan said, “In the future you will go and be scrutinized by someone else.” 

So which is it? Are you a rice type or a sand type?