Genjo Koan

Last year, around Thanksgiving, I went to Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York for their "Eight Gates of Zen" introductory workshop. On Saturday night, I had worked up the courage to go to dokusan with their sensei, John Daido Loori. I told sensei that I had been practicing shikantaza for about three years, but that I felt that my practice had lost its vitality, had lost some of its vigor. At the time, I was looking for someone to blame - my teachers, the Atlanta sangha, friends, anyone but myself.

Daido Loori asked me a few other questions about my practice, I think to gauge the depth of my understanding before answering, then asked me if I had ever read Dogen's Genjo Koan. Even as I answered "Yes," he quoted the opening stanza for me:

"When all dharmas are seen as the Buddha-Dharma, then there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and there is death, there are buddhas and there are ordinary beings. When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no ordinary beings, no life and no death. The Buddha's truth is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity, and so there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are beings and Buddhas. And though it is like this, it is only that flowers, while loved, fall; and weeds while hated, flourish."

"Dogen mentions practice in the first line," Daido said, "but not in the next three. Why is that? What is this practice he is referring to?"

I had no answer, so Daido instructed me "Think about this carefully. Work on this question."

My ego was thrilled: John Daido Loori had given me a koan to work on! But after that thrill faded, I did contemplate the opening stanza of Genjo Koan for many months, and still had not arrived at a satisfactory answer.

One of the problems may have been the nature of the translation. As quoted above, which I recall is close to the way Daido Loori said it to me, the translation is by Gudo Nishijima and Chodo Cross. In the introductory Notes on the Translation, Nishijima Roshi comments, "I like the translation from which Master Dogen's Japanese can be guessed." Well, the Japanese flavor can certainly be tasted in the words. Unfortunately, though, they're a little hard to make sense of grammatically. "When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self . . ." What exactly does that mean?

In order to get a better understanding, I looked up alternate translations on the net. Prof. Masunaga Reiho has the following translation:

"When all things are Buddhism, delusion and enlightenment exist, training exists, life and death exist, Buddhas exist, all-beings exist. When all things belong to the not-self, there are delusion, no enlightenment, no all beings, no birth and decay. Because the Buddha's way transcends the relative and absolute, birth and decay exist, no delusion and enlightenment exist, all-beings and Buddhas exist. And despite this, flowers fall while we treasure their bloom; weeds flourish while we wish them dead."

The grammar is a little less obtuse, but the meaning still isn't quite there. And although he exchanged "practice" for "training," the question as to why it only appears once still isn't clear. And the use of double-negatives around "delusion" creates still more questions.

The San Francisco Zen Center provides this translation:

"As all things are buddha-dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, and birth and death, and there are buddhas and sentient beings. As the myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death. The buddha way is, basically, leaping clear of the many and the one; thus there are birth and death, delusion and realization, sentient beings and buddhas. Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread."

That helped a lot. "When the myriad dharmas are each not of the self . . ." is merely saying that all things are empty, that is, they are without an abiding self. Without an abiding self, they have no "they," thus "there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death." But still, what about this practice? Bob Myers offers a very plain-spoken, direct, and, well, English version of the stanza as follows:

"As truth dawns on the world, you look at things and you see the question of enlightenment, you see practice, you see beginnings and see endings, you see saints, you see sinners. But once you've stripped things of their selves, you no longer see confusion, nor enlightenment, nor wise people nor normal people, nor birth nor death. In the end, finally, life and death become one, confusion and clarity become one, life and death become one, the holy and the mundane become one. For at its heart the true way transcends all opposites. But these are just abstractions. You know the flower blossoms you so adore? They will nevertheless wither and fall. You know the weeds you so detest? They will nevertheless flourish and spread."

Reading that, it starts to become clear that to strip things of the self is the practice, and the perspective of the second line is from practice-enlightenment (the Atlanta Zen Center has t-shirts that read "practicenlightenment"). Since practice and enlightenment are one, and it's already been stated that there is "no enlightenment," it would be redundant to say "no practice." And finally, when a subjective view of the dharma merges with objective enlightenment, all become one, and what then isn't practice?

Finally, speaking of the subjective and the objective, Eido Michael Luetchford of Great Britain provides this incredibly direct translation:

"When we look at the world subjectively, we can find concepts like deluded, enlightened, we can define what is Buddhist practice and what is not, we can give value to life and to death, and we can distinguish between buddhas and ordinary people. But when we look at the world objectively, delusion and enlightenment cannot be found (i.e. are just abstract concepts), buddhas and ordinary people all have exactly the same physical makeup, and life and death are just states of matter. The truth that the Buddha taught is not contained in the area where we analyse and discriminate, and so life is just living, and death is just dying, sometimes we are deluded and sometimes we are clear, some people are buddhas - awake to reality - and others are not. And above all this, things are just as they are, sometimes as we want, sometimes not as we want."

It's really not very necessary to add anything more to that. Gassho to all the translators who went to the effort to put their versions on line, and gassho to the Monday Night crew for helping me struggle through this.

Of course, since the truth that the Buddha taught is not contained in the area where we analyze and discriminate, this intellectual explanation is not true understanding, is just another abstract concept, until it is fully realized, and until it is put into, dare I say it?, practice.