Dogen for the Masses

The Zen Master’s Dance: A Guide to Understanding Dogen and Who You Are in the Universe by Jundo Cohen.  Wisdom Publications.  200 pp.

I’ve heard the name Jundo Cohen in Zen circles for years, and associated him with his teacher, Gudo Nishijima.  Some time ago, I read a book that the two of them co-authored, A Heart to Heart Talk with Zen Master Gudo.  Nishijima is a unique teacher, and I agree with some things he says, other things not so much.  I knew that Cohen had an online presence with Treeleaf Zendo, intended as a place for people to practice who don’t have access to a nearby Zen Center.  But I hadn’t read his writing.

He caught my attention with, of all things, a post on Facebook, in which he answered a student’s questions about sex and Zen practice.[1]  His response, I thought, was lighthearted, funny, and just about perfect; I didn’t disagree with a thing he said.  So many Zen teachers get uptight and moralistic when this subject comes up and begin lecturing from on high with no reference to lives as they’re actually lived.  Cohen seemed relaxed and down to earth.

I began nosing around on the internet and found various articles he’s written, including a whole slew on the Tricycle website.[2]  Like Nishijima (and Nishijima’s teacher Kodo Sawaki), Cohen is an unabashed proponent of shikantaza, the zen of just sitting.  When Dogen came back from China and wrote Bendowa and Fukanzazengi, he stated that zazen was a universal practice, suitable for everyone.  His life and the political situation later made him a proponent of monastic practice, but I think he got it right the first time.  If laypeople can spend twenty minutes a day chanting the Nembutusu or Myo ho ren ge kyo, they could just as easily sit zazen.  It doesn’t require a monastery.  It just requires a butt and a place to put it.

Cohen has the same attitude.  Though he himself is a priest, the clergy in his lineage don’t make much of all the priest craft, or of the distinction between the priests and others.  Sawaki and Uchiyama—teachers of the lineage Nishijima was in—faced the wall for zazen, and their services didn’t include bowing and chanting.  They devoted themselves to zazen, where everyone is equal.

As a man who has lived in Japan for many years and works as a Japanese translator, Cohen is not afraid to take on Dogen.  He actually makes sense of him.  He believes Dogen wrote about Zen the way (hold on to your hats) John Coltrane played the saxophone, that a lot of the time he was doing variations on a theme and not worried about making rational sense.  (It’s a good thing, because rational sense he did not make.  And pardon me, but I’d rather listen to Coltrane than read Dogen.)

You can see Cohen’s down-to-earth attitude when he speaks of the Buddha’s enlightenment, which most writers make into a mysterious event:

“Long ago, Sakyamuni Buddha tried all kinds of practices and all manner of intense meditations in order to find true peace and wholeness in his heart.  He tried deep meditations leading to radically altered states of consciousness.  He pursued philosophical and intellectual understanding.  He even starved himself, trying to punish his body in order to find freedom.  But then one day, after all those many years of effort, the Buddha-to-be sat cross-legged under a tree.  He saw the simplicity and completeness of the morning star rising naturally on the distant horizon and gave up all fighting, striving, and resistance.  He realized that the star, the world, and himself [sic][3] were just what they were, whole and complete.  In that moment, he was freed of the need to fight or to run toward his desires and away from his aversions.  He put aside all judgments and accepted the world on its own terms.  In doing so, the hard borders and feelings of separation and alienation between him and all his life softened and dropped away.  Thus he experienced an abiding wholeness and peace.  He remained in this world with all its divisions, complications and troubles, yet also saw through them into wholeness.”

The Dogen fascicles that Cohen translates and comments on in this book are the classic ones, the heart of Dogen’s writing: Fukan Zazengi, Genjo Koan, Zanmai-O-Zanmai, Ikka Myoju (One Bright Pearl), Uji, and Shoji and Zenki.  I personally like the first two and the last two, places where Dogen speaks most practically; I inevitably get lost in a piece like Uji, where Dogen presents his view of time and eternity.  I’m more interested in the practice than in the discoveries it leads to.

Essentially, Cohen sees the Buddhist path (in the metaphor of the large book, he calls it How to Dance) as twofold:

“The first step is no step, sitting upright and very still.  This is zazen, seated Zen, in which we assume a balanced and stable posture, breathe deeply and naturally, and just sit. . . . we let go of tangled thoughts and judgments as best we can. . . .  We sit in equanimity, beyond judging good or bad, with a sense that this sitting is the one and only act that needs to be done in this moment.

“Master Dogen’s next lesson is the sacredness of all things and activities.  Getting up from the sitting cushion, we return to a life of goals and tasks . . . Master Dogen said we should not separate life and practice, but instead see everything and all moments as sacred practice.”

That, to me, is a simple and effective prescription for how to live one’s life.  It isn’t just for medieval Japan, where you poured the water back into he stream after using it and made sure you had enough mud balls before you went to the outhouse.  It works just as well right now, when we pour water down the drain and make sure we have toilet paper.

As for Being-Time, that devilishly difficult piece about which whole books have been written (I’ve read one), it comes down to holding two things in the mind at once: seeing each moment as entirely itself, not to be compared with any other (when you are, for instance, and arthritic and sometimes befuddled 76-year-old, don’t compare it to the good old days when you were supposedly happier—you weren’t—but completely accept being 76 and arthritic and befuddled, because that’s the moment you’re in); and realizing, at that same time, that each moment of your life includes every other moment, not only of your own life, but of all human history (people speak of my past lives, but in what way, exactly, is it yours.  Your present life isn’t even yours).

Cohen actually takes on Dogen’s more annoying statements, like when he says that not only does time flow from the past to the future, it also flows from the future to the past (when I read that I wanted to say, C’mon, man.  Be real).  But as Cohen points out, what about a situation where you thought one thing happened, and years later you discover that you had the facts wrong and something completely different happened?  The person you thought you were dealing with wasn’t that person at all.  Isn’t that the future flowing into the past?

Makes sense to me.  Dogen actually makes sense.  Can this be?

Jundo Cohen thinks so.

[1] You can see this post here https://www.facebook.com/jundo.cohen by scrolling down to February 15^th.

[2] https://tricycle.org/author/jundocohen/

[3] That word should be “he,” but I’ll allow Cohen one grammatical slip.  He generally writes well.