Gateway to Eternity

Okumura Zen

In the first week of this month we hosted Shohaku Okumura for a Genzo-e sesshin, a special retreat where there are two ninety-minute lectures per day, in a classroom setting, and we spend the rest of the time in zazen, except for our hour-long work period.  Okumura Roshi lectured this time on Menju, the Dogen fascicle he translates as “Face to Face Transmission,” but as usual what he said about the fascicle wasn’t as important (at least to me) as what he said about Dogen in general, and zazen, and spiritual practice, and the universe.  I found the experience exhilarating.  At almost every class I was bowled over by something Okumura said (even though this is the fourth such sesshin I’ve attended, and he’s said many of these things before.  Sometimes you’re ready to hear something).

One thing for instance, is that while Buddhism traditionally says everyone has Buddha nature, Dogen (as usual) worded that teaching differently, saying everyone is Buddha nature.  Previous to Dogen, there was an idea that Buddha Nature was the proverbial diamond that all of us conceal, but that there was a lot of dirt and garbage around it; we had to sit to clear the dirt away and leave the diamond clear.

Dogen didn’t feel that way.  Our body and mind isn’t dirt and garbage around a diamond; the whole thing is diamond, delusions and all.  (It’s like saying to a Quaker, it’s not that you have an inner light.  You are light.  You are a being of light.)  For that reason, he doesn’t advocate zazen as a process, where you’re doing something, sifting through the dirt; instead you practice shikantaza, sitting and watching everything that comes up.  You’re not trying to get rid of anything, or polish some other thing.  You’re seeing how you, as a human being, best function, how things work together.

I must admit that, until Okumura gave that teaching, I had often thought of zazen as a process that allows the dross to fall away and uncovers my true nature.  The dross has seemed endless.  But seeing ourselves that way ignores the fact that our virtues are tied up with our flaws.  I—to mention a flaw that has driven people crazy—have a substantial case of OCD, and have all my life.  Some of my compulsive habits seem strange to those around me (you mean everybody doesn’t count syllables as people talk?).  But it’s my compulsive obsessive nature that makes me a great person to plan a trip, or—for that matter—makes me helpful in the zendo.  I’ve got an eye on everything.

I might also mention my struggles with anxiety, another item that has driven me and those around me out of our collective mind.  I’ve struggled all my life with nameless fears, and a larger fear of life itself.  Yet something in that fear has uncovered truth for me.  The fear of God has indeed been the beginning of wisdom (I’ve written about it endlessly.  Here, for instance.  Or here.)  Fear is a gateway into my spiritual life, and connects me with humanity.

I understand it’s possible to take pills to deal with both anxiety and OCD, and I don’t look down on people who do, but I don’t want them myself.  I don’t want to lose those parts of myself.  I want to go into them.

Okumura has a wonderful explanation of Dogen’s theory of time, in some ways the heart of his teaching (as this book beautifully shows.  It is one of the best books on the entirety of Dogen).  He mentions three ways of seeing time.  One is the conventional way, the chronological horizontal view of time we all have.  This happens, and leads to this, which leads to that.  One event causes another.

Dogen obviously didn’t see things that way (though I assume he showed up for zazen on time).  As Okumura says, the past doesn’t exist because it’s gone, the future because it’s not here yet.  But it’s also true that the present moment—which everyone talks about—doesn’t exist either, because the moment you grab it it’s gone, also because, however small a period of time you’re talking about, it can still be divided into halves: there’s no basic unit of time.  Look at that fact hard enough and you destroy time altogether.  We call this thing now, but it’s never really here.  You grab it and it slips away.

This elusive Now—this is the third way of seeing time—is eternity.  It isn’t that eternity lasts a very long time.  It’s that there’s no time in eternity.  These three views of time become one, once you understand the second.  Time exists as an artificial convention, created by human beings (as Okumura says, there was no time in the age of dinosaurs).  But in an absolute sense there’s no time.  It’s always just now.

That may be the reason Dogen doesn’t buy into causality, the notion—for instance—that doing zazen now leads to enlightenment in the future.  He says that the moment we sit down for our first experience of zazen we’re enlightened (in a sense that is true.  We settle into our body and see that our thoughts are not ourselves, as we had previously thought, but just these goofy little things that keep flying through our minds).  He may mean that, in the light of the absolute, all of our experiences of zazen merge into one thing.  Enlightenment is present the moment we begin to sit, along with all the stages leading to it.

Okumura speaks often of Indra’s net (and seems to take endless pleasure in making drawings of it, with knots at the junctures as various beings).  He uses it to show the way we’re all connected, though we sense ourselves as separate.  This time, for the first time I can remember, he spoke of that net as extending through time, so all beings of the present past and future, all beings through all eternity, are inextricably linked.  It is in that sense that we ask the Buddhas to be with us as we sit.  Things from the distant past affect us now, and things we do now affect the future.  That interconnection of Indra’s nets through time is the Dharmakaya, the larger reality that we’re all connected to, and that we somehow are.

Shakyamuni is the Nirmanakaya, the breaking through of the Dharmakaya into history, though—according to Dogen—he doesn’t affect only those who come after him, but those who come before as well.  Influence goes in both directions.  And the Sambhogakaya is the maintaining of the dharma after Buddha’s appearance, though that goes in both directions as well.

We connect with this reality through zazen.  Normally we make ourselves separate with our selfish views and desires, the way we care only for our existence and perhaps those of a few others.  But in zazen, though our wishes and desires come up, we let them go, opening the hand of thought, and—most importantly—don’t do anything in reaction to them.  We just sit there.  In that act of sitting, we become zero, and merge with reality.  Okumura has created an equation that expresses this truth:  1=0=∞.  That is the reality of our existence, even when we don’t see it (which I must say is most of the time.  Maybe all of the time, for me).

Dogen famously wrote from the point of view of reality and relativity at the same time, not just within the same piece but sometimes within the same sentence.  That’s why he’s so difficult.  But this view of things, which Okumura painstakingly explained over a period of days, finally makes sense of his wildest writings, including the famous passage that we chant as Jijuyu Zanmai.  Check that out if you want a real mind blower.

The whole sesshin was like that.  One mind-blowing moment after another.  I was sleeping only four hours per night, woke up early with these things swimming around in my head.

And what I’ve written here is a tiny part.  There’s much more: the whole of Okumura’s writing, for instance.  And the whole of Dogen’s.