Another Sunday back up in lovely Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Today we talked about practice being not the route to enlightenment but being enlightenment itself. The point of practice is not to take one to the other shore, since practice itself is the other shore.

It's sort of like the Appalachian Trail. The point of hiking the Appalachian Trail is not to get to Mount Katahdin, Maine, but to have the experience of being on the trail. Granted part of that experience is finally arriving at the destination after several arduous and adventurous months, but the real point of it all is life on the trail. And while some speed hikers might get to Katahdin sooner than others, their "achievement" is still not arriving at the endpoint but the way that they arrived at the endpoint (traveling light, walking fast, etc.). No one's experience is any less if it takes them longer to arrive at the end, in fact, the more time on the trail, the more of the trail experience they encounter.

So it is with practice. Sitting is shikantaza is not the process of becoming a Buddha, it is the actual manifestation of our Buddha nature. It may not feel like it, but I have faith that realization of our Buddha nature will gradually and naturally follow expression of that Buddha nature.

Way (Do in Japanese, Dao in Chinese) is a translation of the Sanskrit words marga or bodhi. Bodhi is awareness or enlightenment, represented by Do, as in anuttara-samyak-sambodhi (“Complete Perfect Enlightenment” or more literally, “The Supreme Right and Balanced State of Complete Truth”). Bodhi is not intellectual knowledge but a state of body and mind.

Marga, or Way (also Do) is the Fourth Noble Truth (marga-satya), the Truth of the Right Way. Marga is the path along which we should walk (practice) to become a Buddha; it is the Eightfold Path.

Buddha Way, then, has two meanings combined:

1. The way leading to enlightenment (“Marga”), and
2. The Buddha’s enlightenment itself (“Bodhi”).

So, the Buddha Way is the way we should walk in our daily activities in the direction of the Buddha, while each one of the activities is nothing other than a manifestation of the Buddha’s enlightenment. This is the meaning of Dogen’s expression shusho-ichinyo (practice and enlightenment are one).

Following the discussion, we had a late lunch at the local green grocer, and then I hopped back onto I-75 and drove home to Atlanta.