Verifying the True Dharma Eye (and Falling Down)

Verifying the True Dharma Eye (and Falling Down) August 27, 2010

Thanks to Al’s suggestion in the comments to my last post, I listened to my old friend, Jisho Warner, speak about enlightenment on my drive to work this morning.

Jisho makes a number of important points in a subtle and clearly-thought-through manner. She is a master of the fine distinction. Click here for her talk.

Jisho says that the notion of enlightenment that is popular in classical Zen literature – one great experience that forever transforms everything – is naive and simplistic.

I agree. I’ve only met one person who claimed to have such a once-and-for-all enlightenment and I only partly believed him.

One of her main points is about the notion of “having” the true dharma eye, which she uses as a synonym for “enlightened.” The true dharma eye is not some thing that some one can have, says Jisho.

I agree, of course, although “The World-Honored One Twirls a Flower” koan, does have the Buddha saying, “I have the treasury of the true dharma eye … and I now entrust it to Mahakaysapa.”

Nevertheless, truth and delusion are intimates, constantly hopping along. A moment of enlightened action and one is a sage. A moment of stupid action and one is stupid. The 6th Ancestor said something like that.

In a very personal way, this issue came up again this summer on one of the Zen teacher listserves when one teacher whose teacher has had a long string of sexual relationships with women students said that his teacher (wow, that’s confusing!) had the true dharma eye, despite his behavior.

One might wonder if a person of great practice is subject to the law of karma.

Oh, my goodness, yes. No one is apart as this situation attests.

Yet some of us yearn for full and complete release and freedom from (or within) this swirling world for the benefit of all the many beings. And some of us – perhaps all of us in our more jaded moments – are interested only in steadily walking along – at most.

After all, if enlightenment isn’t going to magically solve all of our problems and finally clear our complexion too and if we’re still going to be karmically responsible for our actions, then, you might ask, what is it good for anyway and why bother?

Well, for starters, verifying the dharma and unfolding enlightenment in daily life is one way to live a vital and meaningful life, freeing everyone together while slobbering along through what Mumon calls “a thousand mistakes, ten thousand mistakes.”

One or two more points on this for now.


Perhaps because of my cross training (koan and shikantaza) I think I see a couple things here that some of my friends who’ve trained only in one or the other field don’t.

First, the term that’s used in koan Zen for breakthrough, “kensho” (literally, seeing nature), has a very specific referent. However, those with shikantaza training tend to use the term to nebulously refer to a large variety of dharma experiences of all types – spiritual excrescence, samadhi, and insight.

And indeed, there are a great many experiences that a diligent practitioner might have that seem to be breakthroughs. For example, we might see warm and fuzzy lights rolling through the zendo. This isn’t a kensho but an excrescence. 

We might breakthrough into a deep, wide and stable heart that fills the universe. This isn’t kensho but probably a state of calm abiding. 

We might have dharma insights about impermanence and nonself and compassion. These also are probably not kensho (or not necessarily) but might still be important and verify an aspect of dharma truth. Bits and pieces of the true dharma eye.


This seems to be one of the sources of miscommunication amongst us – we’re not really talking about the same thingee.

“Kensho” in koan Zen is quite precisely operationalized as having seen Mu and then passed through the checking questions and a bunch more koans. I won’t say what it is, of course, because it’s really important to see it for yourself (and not because I want to jerk you around as a Soto priest recently said about koan teachers).

Of all the realizations that one might have, for over a thousand years in some lineages, this one has been held up as the barrier of the Ancestral teachers. And indeed, it is powerful and important. This one among the many insights is regarded as a pivotal realization because this one among the many is a fulcrum in the sense that it “…supplies capability for action” (one of the dictionary definitions). 

The realization of Mu is embedded in shikantaza Zen as well as koan Zen, of course, hidden in the wide open. 

Seeing Mu and then according the circumstances is what the early steps in the koan process are all about. Following Mu, there is a constant call for the application of the realization in much the same way that carefully attending to the details of the forms of practice in shikantaza Zen call for the actual practice of enlightenment.

In koan Zen, one call to practice enlightenment comes through verbal prompts in the privacy of the dokusan room.

In shikantaza Zen, one call to practice enlightenment comes through the directions of how to sit, walk, stand and lie down. In many cases, it is just such an action that demonstrates the koan. 

And that leaves me wondering, for instance, what is the koan for which the most fitting response is to gassho precisely when entering the zendo?

I’ll leave that aside for now. 

The other point that’s on my mind is that sincere shikantaza practitioners may have already seen Mu … without knowing it. 

Very pure, I suppose, but also kind of a waste because the experience isn’t culled out for ongoing practice verification.

My advice is that if you want to accord with kensho and practice it (not just dump it into the dust bin of nice memories), work with a teacher qualified in such things.


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