This is the third talk on Dogen’s text called "Fukanzazengi." Last time we looked at the passage, You should, therefore, cease from practice based on intellectual understanding, pursuing words and following after speech, and learn the backward step that turns your light inwardly to illuminate your self. Body and mind of themselves will drop away and your original face will be manifest. The text continues, If you want to attain suchness, you should practice suchness without delay.

For a long time, I couldn’t make much out of this, but recently I came across a notation that this refers to Ungo Doyo (Yunju Dao-ying), a disciple of Tozan Ryokai, the 8^th century founder of the Soto lineage in China. The story goes, "One day Ungo addressed his assembly, saying, "If one wants to attain the essence of thusness, one must become a person of thusness. But one is already a person of thusness; so why should one be anxious about the essence of thusness?" This is translated a number of ways and another translation is, "If you want to attain the matter of suchness, you should be a person of suchness. Already being a person of suchness, why worry about such a matter?" The Japanese word (immo) used here for "such" and "thusness" is also translated as "being-as-it-is," or "the all-inclusive reality," or "the fundamental nature of reality." If we want to attain the fundamental nature of reality, we should practice or manifest the fundamental nature of reality right now. The question for many of is, how? I think the rest of the "Fukanzazengi" explains this.

Dogen continued, For sanzen, a quiet room is suitable. Eat and drink moderately. The word "sanzen" is another word for dokusan–a private meeting between teacher and student. The first character "san" means to practice or examine carefully, and sanzen literally means penetrating zen. But in this passage Dogen used sanzen to mean zazen. By doing this, he equated the importance of our daily zazen with meeting a teacher in dokusan, implying that zazen is our teacher.

Next he wrote, Cast aside all involvements and cease all affairs. Do not think good or bad. Do not administer pros and cons. Cease all the movements of the conscious mind, the gauging of all thoughts and views. This doesn’t mean to freeze your mind, keeping thoughts and ideas from entering. It means, don’t intentionally think, plan, strategize or expect anything. For Dogen, the practice of zazen meant not interfering with thoughts as they come and go, neither engaging and developing them nor trying to stop them. According to Carl Bielefeldt this passage should be viewed more as a Zen "comment on the true meaning of suspending worldly affairs which is that worldliness is within, and what must be relinquished... is not merely the external ties to the ... world but [to] the internal mechanisms that lead us to experience and believe in such a world." So, in Zen, renunciation is not just letting go of our of worldly entanglements; what’s emphasized most is letting go of our attachments to, and entanglements with, our views of and beliefs in a separate self.

This section ends, Have no designs on [or plans for] becoming a buddha. Sanzen has nothing whatever to do with sitting or lying down. This expresses Dogen’s belief in inherent enlightenment, which treats practice as an expression of our enlightened nature, rather than a method to cultivate enlightenment. I am slowly realizing that even though Zen stories are generally about historical people and situations, the way the stories are told is fashioned around making a particular point. So, in effect, there is no "true story." And Dogen is well known for rewording traditional Zen stories and passages from sutras to illustrate a particular teaching point.

I want to look in detail at: Have no designs on becoming a buddha. This refers to another story about Huai-rang, who was a disciple of the 6^th Ancestor, Hui-neng, and Huai-rang’s disciple, Ma-Tsu or Baso. The story begins with Ma-Tsu, who had been meditating very seriously and intensely, when one day Huai-rang came to Ma-Tsu’s hermitage while he was meditating and asked him, "What do you seek by doing zazen?" Ma-Tsu said, "I’m seeking to become a buddha [or I’m trying to get enlightened]." (Why else would he be meditating all day?) So Huai-rang picked up a tile that had fallen off the roof and began rubbing or polishing it which was supposed to imitate Ma-Tsu’s activity of cultivating or refining his practice. After a while, Ma-Tsu asked, "Master, what are you doing?" Huai-jang replied, "I’m polishing this tile to make it into a mirror." The mirror represents enlightenment, or the still, reflective quality of mind that reflects things just as they are when consciousness is no longer distorted by delusion.

Ma-Tsu then asked his teacher, "How can you make a mirror by polishing a tile?" Huai-rang shot right back saying, "How can you make a Buddha by sitting in meditation?" Ma-Tsu asked, "Then, what shall I do?" (That is, if I don’t meditate, how do I get enlightened?) Huai-rang responded, "When you are driving a cart, if the cart doesn’t go, should you beat the cart or beat the ox?" The cart is usually considered a metaphor for the body and the ox refers to the mind, and, in Buddhist teaching, mind is considered the source of our experience, while all physical and verbal action is preceded by a mental impulse or intention to act.

Huai-rang continued, "Are you practicing sitting meditation, or are you practicing sitting Buddhahood? If you are practicing sitting meditation, meditation is not sitting or lying down. If you are practicing sitting Buddhahood, ‘Buddha’ is not a fixed form. In the midst of transitory things, one should neither grasp nor reject. If you keep the Buddha seated, this is killing the Buddha, if you cling to the form of sitting, you’re not reaching its principle." At this point, Ma-

Tsu had a realization and continued practicing with Huai-rang for ten more years, continuing to deepen his understanding.

The story ends with Huai-rang’s point that crossing your legs and sitting still, taking the posture of a buddha, doesn’t make you into a buddha anymore than polishing a tile will make it into a mirror. A buddha, or awakened mind, has no fixed form, and clinging to a form is a hindrance which obstructs liberation. Enlightenment is realizing essence of mind, not just holding still. It isn’t something we develop gradually over time by refining our zazen practice, nor is our practice limited to what happens when we cross our legs. If you leave your practice behind when you stand up after zazen, you are dividing your experience into practice and non-practice.

We tend to do this, to compartmentalize our lives: this is my work over here and I need to bring my effort to it and keep on top of things; and over here is my practice and during this time I need to be aware and present; and somewhere there is a little space for fun where I can just relax and forget about effort and awareness. When we do this, the result will be picking and choosing, developing preferences based on attachment to what we enjoy in practice and aversion for what we don’t. This is the way we create and uphold discrimination in our everyday lives. Our human tendency is to bring this into our practice: I like sitting zazen, but I don’t like chanting or the formal zendo meal.

In zazen we try to be aware of our preferences without letting them direct us. For example, in our meal practice in the zendo, during sesshin or all-day sittings, whatever food is served, we accept as an offering. All we have to do is chew it and swallow it. If it is something we especially like, we don't hold it in our mouths for 3 or 4 minutes savoring its flavor before swallowing it; and likewise if the food is something we don't care for, we don't swallow it whole to get rid of as soon as possible. Whatever is served, we just chew and swallow. When we don't try to adjust our circumstances according to our preferences, we get a clearer sense of the strength and quality of our preferences. If we always react to things or adjust ourselves based on our preferences, it is harder to get a sense for this impulse and the extent to which it drives us.

This exchange between Huai-rang and Ma-Tsu criticizes systematic or methodical practice which is used in some forms of Buddhism in which practice is developed in stages. For example, the practitioner might first receive the precepts to purify his accumulated karma, and then cultivate compassion to prepare the mind to meditate, and begin by practicing simple meditation exercises working up to more complex methods that slowly deepen concentration and develop insight, so that gradually one is ready for enlightenment. Instead, this story is supporting the notion of sudden enlightenment – that enlightenment occurs instantaneously by seeing directly into the nature of mind. This is the common or traditional understanding of this story.

But Dogen made some adjustments to the dialogue in his fascicle "Zazenshin," giving it a different emphasis, which turned the traditional meaning of this story upside down. According to Dogen, the meaning of Huai-rang’s question, "What do you seek by doing zazen?" is expressed more accurately when it is read as a statement, "Zazen is that seeking which is the Absolute," which expresses Dogen’s view of the non-duality of zazen practice and enlightenment. Soto Zen begins with the premise that we are already Buddha or inherently enlightened, and it is actually the Buddha we are that enables us to practice in the first place. For Dogen, practice is a manifestation of ultimate reality working through us. In his teaching, Dogen used the terms "manifestation," "actualization" and "verification" instead of "enlightenment" or kensho.

When Huai-rang asked, "What do you seek by doing zazen?" Dogen expressed Ma-Tsu's response "I seek to become a buddha" as "Seeking is buddha-actualization" and then Dogen commented saying, "...zazen is always that 'buddha-actualization' which is one with ‘seeking’; zazen is always that ‘seeking’ which is none other than ‘buddha-actualization’..." The way the wording is changed equates seeking or practice with buddha-actualization. In this sense, the first period of zazen we sit, the zazen we do after years of practice, and our zazen during a long sesshin are all zazen. Each time we totally engage in "just sitting," we practice absolutely; and absolutely means completely, totally, with all-inclusive activity. So there is nothing left over or left out of our zazen. At each point in time, our zazen is buddha-actualization, and there is no progress because there is nothing outside that moment of total engagement to compare it to. For Dogen, zazen practice and actualization are dynamically united and reaffirmed moment by moment.

When Huai-rang was polishing the tile and Ma-Tsu asked, "What are you doing?" Dogen commented, "Polishing a tile has been present in the Absolute," meaning that the activity of Absolute reality is "tile polishing" or practice, and he said this "tile polishing never ceases." According to Dogen, practice is how we express the Absolute. But "absolute" doesn’t mean that there is something that exists in an absolute sense. Absolute means the non-dual nature of reality. Dogen went on to say, that "tile polishing" or practice is not "mirror-making" meaning that the practice of zazen is not a technique to produce enlightenment.

"Tile polishing," or practice, is total, complete and self-sufficient. Therefore, one who practices zazen doesn’t anticipate something down the road called enlightenment. If we do zazen now, thinking about some future enlightenment, we aren't doing zazen. We are thinking about the future. In this practice, there isn’t room for anything else, no room for future, no room for enlightenment, Buddha, or insight. There is only room for one activity: total engagement in immobile sitting, instant after instant; and this total, non-dual engagement is realization. There is no room for the two activities of total engagement and realization. Total engagement is realization.

This total engagement is the activity of throwing our whole body and mind into our present activity without looking outside the present for a result. Our practice, our very presence, is unique and non-repeatable, and each moment of being is complete just as it is.

When Huai-rang asked, "How can you become a Buddha by doing zazen?" it is traditionally seen as disparaging zazen practice. But Dogen turned this around, saying "...one who practices zazen does not anticipate becoming a buddha. The practice of zazen has absolute significance in itself. ... practicing zazen is buddha-actualization. Sometimes I find that Suzuki Roshi made a simple statement that has a nearly incomprehensible twist. For example, in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind he said, "We say, ‘to realize,’ but the realization of the truth is always near at hand. It is not after we practice zazen that we realize the truth; even before we practice zazen, realization is there. It is not after we understand the truth that we attain enlightenment....But usually we understand the practice of zazen and enlightenment as two different things: here is practice, like a pair of glasses, and when we use the practice, like putting the glasses on, we see enlightenment." He said, "This is the wrong understanding. The glasses themselves are enlightenment, and to put them on is also enlightenment. So whatever you do, or even though you do not do anything, enlightenment is there, always."

Dogen taught that practice is how we manifest or express our inherent enlightenment, not how we transform ourselves from a neurotic human being into a buddha. The tile does not become the mirror because the tile already is the mirror. If you are practicing zazen in order to get something, some wonderful state of mind or quality, that you think you don't already have, that is delusion. By reaching out for it, you are reaching away from your own inherent completeness. Suzuki Roshi said, "When you have this posture, you have the right state of mind, so there is no need to try to attain some special state. When you try to attain something, your mind starts to wander about somewhere else." And he said, "In other words, just practice on your cushion without expecting anything."

In Dogen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, Carl Bielefeldt wrote, "...our own zazen is nothing but the primordial activity of all things–always present, even before we recognize it, always perfected, always functioning in the world around us."

Some of us are participating in the all-day sitting today. All we have to do is sit upright totally engaging in immobile sitting, engaging with the primordial activity of all beings. In zazen we don’t have to sit for thirty minutes or forty minutes, or for two or three more periods: all we have to do is engage completely with this one moment.