A Single Vegetable: Wholehearted Play Webinar 3

This section of Dogen’s Instructions for the Cook seems especially rich. Dogen mixes important principles for practice in with “immersion in the mundane,” as one practitioner put it. Click here for the recording of the dharma presentation section of this webinar. Once it gets rolling, select View and Video. 

Here are a few of the dharma tidbits we are practicing with this week: 

High places are high and level; low places are low and level. 

During the day and through the night, whether things come and dwell in your mind or your mind turns and dwells on things, put yourself on a par with them and diligently pursue the way. 

When ordinarily preparing ingredients, do not regard them with ordinary eyes, or think of them with ordinary emotions.

Lifting a single blade of grass builds a shrine; entering a single mote of dust turns the great wheel of the dharma. 

If one is at the outset free from preferences, how could one have any aversions?

With resolve and sincerity, one should aim to exceed the ancients in purity and surpass the former worthies in attentiveness.