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<\/a><\/p>\nWhen you reach this point of \u201cno stink of enlightenment\u201d where there is no trace, you vow with great determination to let the absence of enlightenment continue long, long, long like a single rail of iron for myriad miles. This is Great Practice that encompasses the entire future.<\/span> \u2013 Bokusan<\/span><\/p>\n In this post I\u2019ll focus on the Great Practice aspect of Bokusan\u2019s Genjokoan comments. I\u2019ve written here before about the meaning of shu and gyo<\/a>.<\/p><\/span><\/div>\n When you reach this point of \u201cno stink of enlightenment\u201d where there is no trace, you vow with great determination to let the absence of enlightenment continue long, long, long like a single rail of iron for myriad miles. This is Great Practice that encompasses the entire future. \u2013 Bokusan As the old saying goes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
As the old saying goes, \u201cZen is like soap. First we wash with it and then we wash it off.\u201d\n
Dogen\u2019s Daishugyo <\/span>fascicle parses the Wild Fox Koan, examining one aspect of our secret practice \u2013 that if we really train and realize then we\u2019ll be free from karma and suffering. Then we\u2019ll be safe and good and beyond the reproaches of this life.<\/span><\/div>\n
It is helpful to look carefully in order to discover what is meant here by \u201cGreat Practice.\u201d Dai-shu-gyo is composed of three characters. \u201cDai\u201d is great \u2013 simple enough, but too big to know.<\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cShu\u201d is often translated as \u201cpractice\u201d but literally means to \u201cgovern oneself, conduct oneself well.\u201d If each person engaged in the Buddha Way is to govern oneself, then each practitioner is sovereign.<\/span><\/div>\n
Some teachers in the Zen world train students by first treating them like children with the teacher as the parent, as if this were the medieval world with its feudal power arrangement. People in the post-modern world are not serfs (or 18-year-old Japanese guys) so this approach is out of tune with the spirit of \u201cshu. It may invite students who are willing to pretend to be children but this is not a recipe, in my view, for face-to-face transmission.<\/span><\/div>\n
Here\u2019s a koan from the Book of Serenity,<\/span> Case 97, featuring a dialogue between a worldly sovereign and a dharma<\/a> sovereign \u2013 two voices within each practitioner engaging in intimate inquiry together.<\/span><\/div>\n
The introduction to the koan asks this question: \u201cWhen a worldly sovereign of the dharma sovereign meet, what should they discuss?\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Emperor Doko spoke to Koke saying, \u201cI have the treasure of the Central Plain. However, no one can set a price on it.\u201d
Koke said, \u201cYour Majesty, please lend it to me so that I may see.\u201d
The emperor pulled the straps of his hat with both hands. Koke said, \u201cWho can dare to set a price on the emperor\u2019s treasure!\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
<\/span>The commentary has this helpful instruction: \u201cFirst get to know the sovereign; then we must know s\/he is in the Central Plain; after that I want to ask you where your jewel is.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Katagiri Roshi often said to us, \u201cYou must be master of the self.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Getting to know the sovereign is a precondition of truly being the master of the self, governing oneself well withing the flux and flow of the 10,000 things.<\/span><\/div>\n
The third character in Daishugyo<\/span>, \u201cgyo\u201d is also often glossed as \u201cpractice\u201d (e.g., Dogen\u2019s \u201cGyo-ji\u201d is often translated as \u201cContinuous Practice\u201d). \u201cGyo\u201d is a radical that refers to \u201cgoing\u201d or \u201caction.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
Originally, hsing (Japanese, gyo) had the primary senses of walking or walkways and doing in the sense of working\u2026. In a largely nonvehicular society, walking connects us, establishing and maintaining in the most concrete and daily fashion our ongoing interrelation. No path or thoroughfare proceeds from wilderness or desert to more of the same, but only from family to family, from village to village. Our roads and markets lining them are evidence of the diverse manners in which we are continually being led together, the unique ways in which we benefit and share with and in one another\u2019s labor.<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
\u201cGyo,\u201d in its original usage had to do with moving, doing and connecting \u2013 with intimacy. Together, \u201cshu+gyo\u201d = governing oneself well within the activity of connection. The question in the Wild Fox koan, then, goes like this: \u201cIs a person engaged in sovereign, intimate and immeasurable connection free from karma?<\/span><\/div>\n
Freedom from karma is the activity of grinding off the stink of enlightenment and the stink of stink. Take, for example, the experience I had while studying with Katagiri Roshi that I mentioned recently. As I saw myself more clearly, I could hardly stand how self-centered I was. Barry commented how that is the basis of compassion for others in all their wonderful stinkiness. Nicely put.<\/span><\/div>\n
And then ego co-opts this compassionate self and reifies it as something enduring. And then we see agin how stinky we are and rediscover again the basis for a living compassion.<\/span><\/div>\n
Intensive forms of training like sesshin, help us sit facing ourselves for days without escape, sometimes steeping in the stink of whatever rotting corpse of a self we\u2019re carrying. The wonderful virtue of sesshin is that it is relatively easy to discover that letting go, although counter-intuitive, is really the only sane option.<\/span><\/div>\n
Capping Phrase<\/span>:
\u201cStumbling about in darkness, you keep bumping into yourself thinking it\u2019s someone else\u201d (from Daido Loori\u2019s note 3 to \u201c107: Yumen\u2019s Two Types of Sickness\u201d in The True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen\u2019s Three Hundred Koans<\/span>).<\/span><\/div>\n