Realization Is The State Of Ambiguity Itself

Still riffing on Dogen:

When fish move through water, however they move, there is no end to the water. When birds fly through the sky, however they fly, there is no end to the sky. Fish and birds have never once, since antiquity, run out of water or run out of sky. When their need for water or sky is great, its availability is great, and when their need for water or sky is small, its availability is small. Acting this way, fish and birds realize their limitations yet at every moment somersault freely through their realm; but if a bird leaves the sky it will die at once, and if a fish leaves the water it will die at once. So we understand that water is life and that sky is life. Birds are life, and fish are life. It may also be that life is birds and that life is fish. 

The experience of our own existence is also like this. If a bird or a fish decided to move through the water or the sky only after getting to the end of water or utterly penetrating the sky, it would never find its way or its place in the water or sky. When we have found our own place in our own realm, we have arrived at potential. When we maintain our own true way, our action is potential itself. 

Our own way and our own place are neither great nor small; they are neither subjective nor objective; they have not existed in the past nor do they arise in the present; they are just as they are. In maintaining our own true way and abiding in our own place, to consider one thing is to explore only that one thing, and to perform one action is to fully participate in that one action. In this state, we exist in our own space and practice our own way, and awareness of ourselves is not conspicuous. The reason this is so is that our own thoughts and actions and the realization of potential appear together and are experienced together. 

Do not assume that we can be conscious of potential, or that potential can be recognized by the intellect. The experience of potential is not necessarily a cognitive realization. 

Realization is the state of ambiguity itself.

When potential has not been fully experienced, we feel that we already understand it. When we actually do experience potential, we feel that some aspect of our understanding must surely be lacking.

For example, when sailing out beyond the mountains and into the ocean, when we look around in the four directions, the ocean appears to be round; it does not appear to have any other shape at all. Nevertheless, the great ocean is not round nor is it square. The actual qualities of the ocean are inexhaustible: to fish it is like a palace and to an island it is like a necklace.  But as far as our eyes can see, it just appears to be round. 

As it is for the ocean, so it is for potential.  Whether caught up in the dusty world or beyond our worldly frame of reference, potential encompasses innumerable situations, but we understand only as far as our eyes can see. We should remember that beyond being square or round, the full aspects of oceans and mountains are numerous and endless, and there are whole worlds in the four directions. Not only is the vastness of space like this: remember, this present moment and a single drop of water are also like this. (liberally adapted from Genjo Koan in Dogen's Shobogenzo)

Dogen assumes the relative viewpoint in the next sentence of Genjo Koan:

When the moon is reflected in water, the moon does not get wet and the water is not disturbed. Though the light of the moon is wide and great, it is reflected in a foot or an inch of water. The whole moon and the whole sky are reflected in a single dewdrop on a blade of grass. 

He then compares this observation with a statement that transcends the relative and the absolute:

Potential does not annihilate the individual, just as the moon does not disturb the water. The individual does not hinder potential, just as a dewdrop does not hinder the sky and moon. 

And then he wraps the paragraph up with the practical:

The depth of potential may be as high as the moon. We can experience its duration with our body and mind, and observe its breadth the sky and the moon.

Continuing to reinterpret, possibly misinterpret some might say, Dogen for my own purposes, Genjo Koan, the third fascicle of Dogen's Shobogenzo, continues to discuss misconceptions about what I call potential, using some easily understood analogies.

When people seek after potential, they are very far from potential. But as soon as potential is realized, we are human beings in our original element.

Picture a person in a boat on a river: When she looks to the shore, she mistakenly assumes that the shore is moving. If she keeps her eyes fixed on the boat, she knows that it is the boat that is actually moving.  Similarly, when we try to understand potential on the basis of our confused assumptions about body and mind, we mistakenly assume that our own mind or our own essence is a fixed or permanent thing.  But as we become familiar with potential, the truth is evident that there is no "self" in potential. 

Firewood becomes ash - it can never go back to being firewood. Nevertheless, we should not take the view that ash is its future and firewood is its past.  Remember, in the eternal present moment, firewood is always firewood. Even though the present firewood has a past and a future, the past and the future are not part of the present moment.  Ash exists in the present moment as ash, and it, too, has a past and a future. Firewood, after becoming ash, does not become firewood again.

Similarly, after death, human beings do not live again, but it is not said that life turns into death.  Buddhists call this “no appearance.” Similarly, death does not turn into life. Buddhists call this “no disappearance.” Life exists in the present moment and death exists in the present moment.  It is the same, for example, with winter and spring. We do not think that winter becomes spring, and we do not say that spring becomes summer.  It is always the present moment, regardless of the season.

In Genjo Koan, Dogen continues his discussion with the following lines (paraphrased below):

To study the way is to study the self.
To study the self is to forget the self.
To forget the self is to be experienced by potential.
To be experienced by potential is to let your body and mind, and the body and mind of the external world, fall away. 

There is a state in which all traces of realization are forgotten, and a state where the traces of forgotten realization are manifest for a long, long time.

While We Are Experiencing One Side, We Are Blind To The Other

When we use the body and mind to look at forms, and when we use the body and mind to listen to sounds, even though we are sensing them directly, it is not like a mirror’s reflection of an image, and not like water and the moon. While we are experiencing one side, we are blind to the other side.

Dogen, speaking quite straightforwardly now, tells us that when we perceive the so-called external world, we are still not separate from that external world, like a mirror's image is separate from what's being reflected, or the reflection of the moon on the water is a separate thing from the moon itself. The words that you're reading right now in this post are not "out there" somewhere separate from you yourself.  It's all potential experiencing potential.

While we are experiencing the world of the relative, the world of various forms and objects that our discriminating mind divides from limitless potential, we are blind to the fact that those various forms and objects also include the one experiencing them.  In the world of the absolute, both subject and object, the perceiver and the perceived, are both nothing but potential.  But while we experience the relative, we are blind to the absolute.  

This implies that if we stop using the body and mind to sense forms and sounds, the blindness may fall away.  To do this (stop using mind and body), sit quietly somewhere, etc. . . .  

The Totem of Practice and Delusion

Dogen continues bouncing from one viewpoint to the other in the next passage of Genjo Koan, the third fascicle of the Shobogenzo:

Driving ourselves to practice and experience potential is delusion. When potential actively practices and experiences us, that is the state of realization. 

Those who realize their delusion are buddhas. Ordinary beings are those who are deluded about realization. 

But there are also people who realize potential on the basis of realization, and there are people who fall deeper into delusion due to their own delusions. 

Those buddhas who realize potential do not consider themselves to be buddhas. Nevertheless, they are buddhas as they continue to experience potential.

I've taken a lot of liberties with my interpretation.  I encourage the interested reader to compare my interpretation with any of the fine translations out there to get a better sense both of what Dogen was saying and what I mean.

Dogen's first lines above contrast the relative and the absolute:  it is delusional to think that potential is a thing that can be grasped and attained, that it is a "thing" at all (the relative view).  Dogen contrasts that with the absolute view, a realization that everything always was and always will be potential, that we arise from potential, not the other way around.

The next pair of lines are playfully transcendental: those who realize they are deluded are awakened, and those who think that they are awakened are actually deluded.  But before we get stuck thinking "black is white and white is black," Dogen mixes it up in the next lines and says there are those who are awakened to their awakening and those who are deluded by their own delusions ("black is black and white is white").

The closing lines express the practical viewpoint, and resolve the previous lines: since in potential there is no differentiation between this or that, between self or other, those experiencing the state of potential do not think of themselves as "buddhas" or "awakened," or for that matter, as "selves."  Yet it is in this state, Dogen points out, that they are in fact buddhas. 

This raises the question, if those experiencing the state of potential do not think of themselves as buddhas, or even as selves, what do they think?  Can this question even be answered, as any answer will by necessity involve trying to imagine or reify potential and realization, which Dogen points out is actually delusion.  

However, the answer can be experienced.  In order to experience the answer, sit comfortably someplace and focus your attention on your breath. Breathing slowly but naturally, count "one," then "two," and so on with each exhalation until you get to ten, and then start the count over again.  Do this for 10 minutes.

Reading Dogen

I've recently heard someone describe Eihei Dogen's masterwork Shobogenzo as "basically impenetrable," and over the years I've heard many people express frustration over the difficulty of reading Dogen (and to be honest, I have experienced difficulty myself).

Shobogenzo is not an "easy" read by any stretch of the imagination, not the least reason of which are the numerous translation issues and problems. As I understand it, it's difficult to translate Dogen's medieval Japanese into modern Japanese, much less 21st Century English, and the subtlety of Dogen's concepts renders translation by those not practiced at meditation and familiar with Zen Buddhist thought nearly impossible.  

Further, I don't think Dogen wrote Shobogenzo as a book to be read from front cover to back.  It's  a distillation of everything that Dogen had learned about Buddhism in his own monastic studies and during his time in China, and what he wanted to memorialize for future generations of Japanese monks.  Also, and most importantly, he writes at various times from any one of four different philosophical viewpoints and the fun in reading Dogen is trying to keep up with him and figure out which of the points of view he's speaking from at any particular moment.

I call the four viewpoints the relative, the absolute, the transcendental, and the practical, and Dogen pretty much spells out his heuristic in the opening lines of Genjo Koan, one of the early fascicles of the Shobogenzo.  

"When all dharmas are seen as the buddha-dharma," he writes, "there is delusion and realization, there is practice, there is life and there is death, there are buddhas and there are ordinary beings." This is the relative viewpoint, the way most of us experience life, where the cookie-cutter mind has divided the continuous fabric of potential into separate little "things" (dharmas).  

The absolute point of view is expressed in the next line, "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."  Here Dogen is acknowledging that beyond the division into separate dharma-things by the mind (the ego-self), there is only potential, and all of the things he just identified - delusion, realization, buddhas, ordinary beings, life, and death - don't really exist.  If there's no self, there's no mind to divide potential into this-and-that.  He's not contradicting the previous line, he's just describing the relative world of this-and-that from the absolute viewpoint of everything being what I call potential.

The next point of view transcends the dualistic distinction between the relative and the absolute. "Because the Buddha’s truth is originally transcendent over abundance and scarcity" (or any other pair of opposites for that matter) "there is life and death, there is delusion and realization, there are ordinary beings and buddhas."  In other words, without falling into one philosophical camp or the other regarding the existence or non-existence of dharma-things, we can regard life and death and so one while clinging neither to their existence or non-existence.  In the transcendental, it matters not whether you are eating red beans and rice, or whether you eating red beans and rice is merely potential consuming potential - there is still eating going on one way or the other.  

And finally, as we should ask all philosophers, "so what?"  This leads us to the practical, about which Dogen merely writes poetically, "Though it is like this, it is only that flowers, while loved, fall; and weeds while hated, flourish."

So there you have it, four different viewpoints, four different philosophies, no one of which is "right" or "wrong," and no one of which proves or disproves any other.  When Dogen writes, he often first expresses things from one of these viewpoints - often, but by no means always, from the absolute at first, and then doubles back and expresses it again from another viewpoint, without warning when he changes or which view he's just adopted.  It can get maddening at times and Shobogenzo often reads something like "The cow jumped over the moon.  The moon jumped over the cow,  There is no cow and there is no moon, there is only jumping."  But once you get used to it, and abandon any goals of reading through his prose "quickly" or in one sitting, it can be very rewarding to follow his quick and agile mind from one vista to the next.  I enjoy reading Dogen and I enjoy the mental workout his writing provides, and if I don't read anything by Dogen for some period of time, I find that I miss it.

So here's how I would interpret the opening passage of Genjo Koan: 

"When we look at the world, we see delusion and realization, we see practice, we see life and death, we see buddhas and we see ordinary beings.  But without the discriminating mind of the ego-self, there is no delusion or realization, no life and death, and no buddhas and ordinary beings.  But as the distinction between existence and non-existence is itself just another dualistic concept, we can discuss delusion and realization, life and death, and buddhas and ordinary beings, regardless of their existential state.  For example, we can say that beloved flowers fall even as hated weeds flourish."

I don't know if any of this makes sense to anyone else - these things are hard to talk about, and maybe that's what makes Dogen so hard to read.

Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt.  Chase after money and security, and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back: the only path to serenity. - Lao Tzu (Tao Te Ching, #9)

Most of my work at Fort McPherson now seems to be over - the project is still continuing, but it's now at a point where it doesn't appear to need my full-time, on-site participation.  

While I won't pretend that I liked the high-90s heat and humidity associated with field work in Georgia in mid-July, I do feel a certain satisfaction of having risen to the challenge and completing the task I had assigned myself.

I've found that it is much more pleasant to go through life saying "yes" and accepting what comes rather than fiercely fighting to have things "my way," that is, saying "no" to life as it actually is and attempting to impose my own will on the grand scheme of things.

I've also found that it's easier to remember this back in the air-conditioned comfort of home than under the Georgia sun while getting attacked by bees.

14th Street, Atlanta, 10:34 a.m.

While sitting in The Goat Farm's Warhorse Cafe with Miss Mint Medley Tea and some Indian classical music playing in the background, the gloATL dancers suddenly appear in the room and begin their silent slow-mo movements through the space and raise our mundane consciousness to the artistic possibilities of the present moment.

Or, your moment of Zen.

There's Always Another Way

If you desire to gaze out over wide vistas, you do well to climb up to a high spot. But if you wish to gaze into the human heart, you must climb down and look from a low place. - Morinaga

Friends

At 7:30 this morning, this little guy jumped on the windshield of my car and then somehow held on as I drove on the Interstate Highways all the way down to Fort McPherson.  I thought I had lost him, but when I got out of the car I found him on the sunroof as if nothing had happened.

I forgot about him after an eight-plus hour day on the Base, but once I arrived back home I found him still clinging to the rear of my car. You have to admire his tenacity.

Outside of that little distraction, the usual fun and games at the site today.  Just another day in paradise (this time, with grasshoppers!). 

Week Two: still looking for a place that's neither hot nor cold.

Today's Mysteries

Today at the Fort

Trees

"Just think of the trees: they let the birds perch and fly, with no intention to call them when they come and no longing for their return when they fly away.  If people's hearts can be like the trees, they will not be off the Way." - Langya Jiao

So What, You Ask, Does Potential Have To Do With Meditation?

Good question (even if I'm actually the one asking it).  First, recall that it's incomplete to say that everything has potential.  Everything is potential itself, it's not an attribute that we have but the very substance of what we are, and it's only the human mind (maybe some other mammals, too, but we can't really know because of that whole inter-species communication thing) that separates the unified field of potential into separate objects and things, including "self'" and "other." 

This includes the concept of potential itself.  Whatever it is that we think of as potential is actually just another thought, itself a separation by our minds from the whole of the rest of the unified field. If we think that potential is x, then the rest of the universe, everything that isn't our concept of potential, is logically something greater than x (x + y, where y is everything that we've decided potential is not). In other words, we can never grasp potential intellectually - whatever we think it is, by definition, it isn't.

If you decide that potential is in fact x + y - your concept of potential and everything that's not your concept - then that implies the existence of some z, as x and y can be summed into some single totality and z is everything beyond the concept of that totality, and so on down the rabbit hole of ideation and mental constructs. Potential is beyond what our minds can conceive - it is literally the inconceivable. 

But when we quiet the mind by sitting still and concentrating on not engaging our thoughts, the conscious mind, or at least that constant running monologue in our heads, starts to quiet down.  We can just sit (as opposed to sitting and observing, or sitting and identifying our moods or our states of consciousness), and when we just sit, the cookie-cutter mind quiets down and stops dividing potential into this and that and we can actually start to experience potential instead of merely objectifying or trying to conceive of it.

If during this experience the thought arises, "Aha!  So this is what potential must feel like" (or something along those lines), then we've just lost whatever it is we were experiencing, as the very thought itself has just separated the observer from the observed.  There's no point in sitting with the intention of manifesting potential, to actively seek out the experience of potential, but if we instead just sort of give up trying and engage in a sort of goalless "just sitting," the experience will manifest on its own. 

Even if we can't grasp it at the time, afterwards we are subtly different for having directly experienced that each of us are not separate from the fabric of potential but are a part, for lack of a better word, of the unified, interdependent, and impermanent whole.

Don't want to experience potential?  Fine, your choice, then don't meditate.  Don't want to meditate? Again, your choice, but then we can't you and I have an informed conversation about potential. When it gets down to it, it's really all just a matter of personal preference.     

Another Day on the Base

A full week of field work at Fort McPherson now complete, with the temperatures reaching 100 degrees today and the remorseless sun beating remorselessly down.  Shade, when it could be found, was a welcome commodity.

And to think, I get to do it all over again next week. 

My "Office" Today at Fort McPherson

Interesting historical note: this is the building where the trial of Lt. William Calley was held for the 1968 My Lai Massacre.

Fort McPherson, Day Three (No Bees)

So what it the temperatures and the humidity are both up in the high 90s?  This is still the view from my "office" for the day, and a small step forward to new enterprise in Atlanta.

All of these pictures are of various potentials at a certain space and time.