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<\/a><\/p>\nA protagonist might say, \u201cIn my lineage, practice and enlightenment are one. Therefore, every moment of every zazen of every person is complete enlightenment. You seem to be saying in these rambling blogs that verification is outside practice. \u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Response: What I\u2019m saying here is that although practice and enlightenment are not separate as people commonly believe, neither are they one as people commonly believe. More like the boy, dog and ball are one.<\/p>\n As old boy Dogen puts it (to paraphrase from Maka hannya haramitsu<\/span>), practice is enlightenment, enlightenment is practice, and practice is also practice, enlightenment is also enlightenment.<\/p>\n The just (dead) sitting crowd, imho, ain\u2019t savvy to the last part of the equation.<\/p>\n In addition, while encouraging tolerance for our common views about illusion, what I\u2019m suggesting here (following Kyogo with the hope that you, the reader, will test this in practice if you haven\u2019t already) is the importance of being intolerant with our own common views of verification.<\/p>\n As Nagarjuna said, \u201cThose who hold a view of emptiness are said to be incurable.\u201d<\/p>\n At least in the \u201cholding a view\u201d moment \u2013 or we\u2019re all incurable (and that\u2019s perhaps his point).<\/p>\n Or as an astute blog commenter put it, \u201cTo view verification in the common way may mean that we have become intolerant to illusion and thus allowed illusion to narrow our view of verification.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, rigorously let it go, man\/woman.<\/p>\n The view of the protagonist above is based on an unverifiable belief that denigrates both practice by gutting its power and diminishes enlightenment by attempting to paste a common view on the very slippery it<\/span><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n Rather than a zazen that has nothing to do with sitting or standing, those who hold the protagonist\u2019s view also tend to give the form of zazen an inappropriately special and magical power that promotes a passive \u201cdo me dharma\u201d attitude.<\/p>\n Further, what the proponents of a sloppy conflation of practicenlightenment (no big E) suggest is not verifiable and therefore, it is not a Buddhist<\/a> proposition.<\/p>\n Why? It is not testable \u2013 verifiable. If illusion and enlightenment are one as they argue, then enlightenment could not be realized because it is collapsed into illusion. The proposition can only be supported by belief or authority. What they fail to verify is the dynamic functioning of nondual wisdom. Emptiness is also emptiness.<\/p>\n Nor is their fixed view supported by carefully studying the words of our dharma ancestors. For example:<\/p>\n After we have produced the thought of enlightenment and turned to practice the Buddha Way, when we are wholeheartedly performing difficult practices, though we may be performing them, we do not have one hit in a hundred practices. <\/span><\/span> If in the course of practice there are hits and misses, every sitting is simply not a hit. Further, verification is not coming to believe that each moment of zazen is complete. Such a practice is merely a cognitive reframing exercise that abuses the vivid truth of the incomplete and broken.<\/p>\n And here\u2019s where believing every miss is a hit becomes a problem (in addition to the constant mind screw of insisting that shit is ambrosia \u2013 it is also just shit) \u2013 the belief that practice and enlightenment are one in a dead and sloppy way (or as a cognitive reframing tricky way), may discourage wholeheartedly throwing away, and being thrown away, missing, missing, missing\u2026 (hitting).<\/p>\n
<\/span> Still, \u201cwhether from a friend, whether from a scripture,\u201d eventually we hit it. This one hit in the present is the power of a hundred misses in the past, is the \u201cone maturation\u201d of a hundred misses. <\/span><\/span>
\u2013 Dogen in <\/span>Talking of Mind, Talking of Nature<\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n