Painted Rice Cakes

Part of Ms. Luo’s question at the beginning of class on Tuesday really resonated with something I was also wondering about “Mountains and Waters Sutra”: is Dōgen subtly bringing us back around to an essentialist position of some kind—if in an entirely novel form—after Buddhism had done away with it, seemingly definitively? We know from reading Nāgārjuna that nothing possesses ‘ svabhava ’—the self-existence of a thing which both defines it and grounds its existence within itself. When we say that things are empty of self-existence, we are simply saying that the basis of their existence resides not in themselves, but in the causes and conditions that give rise to them, and because all things are dependently arisen, nothing at all possesses svabhava . I think what essences are—and why any Buddhist who accepts dependent origination must reject them—is clear enough. But there are a few moments in what we have read of Dōgen so far where he suggests something that, to my ear, sounds eeril...

  Full potential unfolds by abiding in a things own condition. "Now" landscape actualizes "ancient" buddha expression. Mountain walking looks different from human walking. Lack of understanding might be because of the world of phenomena used as the standard. Walking equals permanence. Forward and backward movement never ceases and never obstructs. Characteristics of walking, flowing, and birthing manifest form and life force? Or is it the other way around? "Pursue beyond the limit of pursuit" As I look over my notebook entries at the things that jumped out of the pages at me and how I summed them up in my own words, a theme has emerged to me. It is also in light of our latest conversation about the possibility of water representing life or self. As I consider how life flows unceasingly, and how sometimes it feels like I am moving forward, achieving, and sometimes like I'm stuck, still, but not in the peaceful kind of still, or even times when I'm t...

The Mother-Child Gives birth to a child Brings forth a gift Begets the ever-begotten Continues the lineage.   In the beginning a flutter At the end, interminable determination The release inevitable, but freedom optional The child awakens, the mother-child is born.   No longer is the sky seen through a bamboo pipe. It is revealed in all its glory and terror. Separated at birth or practice-realization actualized? Let me go, she wails!   When your child is born, you become a child Vulnerable, fearing, grasping Let my veins be your source again No, the Mothers say: You have been initiated into birthinghood.   The stone child flies away to the great tree. The mother-child knows.     Dogen says to understand the  meaning of gives birth to a child  (his italics, or the translator’s). I have given birth many times, twice to physical babies, who arrived through my physical body, and many times through poems, most of which were birthed in two years of...

    Is there anything worse than a really bad hangover? Not like the noticeable but easily negotiated headache and sore eyes when you first wake up, you know, the hangover that can be washed away with a warm shower and some coffee. No, I am talking about the hangover that loiters and lingers; the one that sneers at all of your feeble attempts to remedy, absorbing and growing stronger with each attempt. The one that continues day, after day, weighing you down like a taut fanny pack of potatoes. Yeah, I am talking about THAT hangover…   Of course there are ‘worse’ things, I was speaking metaphorically, or perhaps it was rhetorically…? in any case, I am sure you catch my drift. This is how I have felt over the last week, hung over, rereading my post again and again, like an itch I can’t quite scratch, sifting through it like a bloodhound for any missed vowel or comma, a clunky phrase or tendentious declaration; really anything that could thrown back in my face. “AH HA! We go...

  Ms. Diaz’s latest post touched me, and oddly got me thinking about the time I might have spent in Japan. If I had been in a Zen practice many years ago, under the strict supervision of a traditional Zen instructor, I would have learned how to fake being a really good meditator. Otherwise I would have been beaten quite a lot. Eventually it would have been time to leave the monastery.   Instructor: Did you meditate today? Me: No.   Instructor: Why didn’t you meditate like you are supposed to? Me: Didn’t feel like it.   Instructor: Aren’t you scared of my stick anymore? Me: Yes, I truly hate your stick. I just don’t want to meditate.   Instructor: Do you have a reason for not meditating? Me: Good question. I think I’m done with it. Ouch. Hey, that’s not fair. Put the stick down, OK? Let’s talk a bit, man to man. Instructor: I am your instructor. I am not here to talk. And you are not a man yet. Me: Yeah, I get it. But either I leave righ...

  Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire universe and the open sky are nothing but a painting. (Painting of a rice cake)   What does it mean for all of life to be a painting? Dogen says everything is a painting, and so all paintings are real; otherwise, if paintings are not real, nothing is real. I ask myself: have I had this recognition? Indeed how would I even know that I arrived at such a recognition? It is one thing to say everything is painted and think about the idea, but what does it mean to understand this in my body and mind? Dogen tells us that when we understand that all of life is a painting, we will thoroughly experience the ability to turn things and be turned by things. Ok—what does it mean to turn things and be turned by things? Maybe I have a sense of turning things; I mean physically speaking, but do I know what it is like to have a thing turn me?   The phrase a painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger, Dogen informs us, is often ...

While we might expect a philosophical or religious text to present wisdom as the result of concerted effort and practice as the continued application of this wisdom, Dogen posits a more supple and elusive nature of knowing and practicing. We tend to think of wisdom as an accumulative process, one of applying information and experience toward some higher form of knowing, often done under the guidance of some sort of mentor. We imagine "enlightenment" entails some sort of "aha" moment, the realization achieved at the culmination of all of our converting information into knowledge into wisdom, as though we reach a final stage of enlightenment that we then maintain for the rest of our days. This approach treats wisdom as though it can be broken down into constitutive steps that, were one to follow them closely, assure the ultimate achievement: enlightenment. But Dogen thwarts our tidy process-driven conceptualization of enlightenment and its relationship to the "en...

  "Hence, you should stop searching for phrases and chasing after words. Take the backward step and turn the light inward. Your body-mind of itself will drop off and your original face will appear. If you want to attain just this, immediately practice just this." Anyone who has been in class with me for longer than five minutes knows I'm not a philosopher. Did we even read Hegel in the LA? I honestly could not tell you! I can't remember half the material we read as it feels like I'm being hit in the face with a fire hose most days when working through Saint Johns material. The scope of what we cover in one program is vast and varied and deep. I love it, I appreciate it, and I'm growing because of it. But something in addition to philosophy happens for me. I came to Saint Johns feeling like a very broken person, coming out of a decades-long struggle with my world. A lot of that will seep out in class or in one-on-one conversations with me, and I'm okay with...

  One morning, as I woke from anxious dreams, I discovered that in bed I had been changed into a  metaphor. Not just me, it turned out, as I poured my coffee. The coffee maker was a metaphor, too, and so was the coffee. Not only was nothing quite as it seemed. It – that is, the nothing that saturated all the things that I was investigating – also wasn’t real, or, I thought, as real as I would have expected.   Q: How long were you a metaphor? A: About six months.   Q: What was it like being a metaphor? A: What was it like ? You want me to use a simile to describe what it was to be a metaphor?   Q: That’s not fair. A: Maybe not. But did you know that the word “fair” derives from an early word for “to fasten or to place”? Being fair rests on making two out of one or orienting something. Pretty prosaic stuff. Not a lot of morality to that.   Q: I have no idea why you pointed that out. So describe to me life as a metaphor. A: That’s ha...

  The Eye of Practice (Carter)   The place where I live is called Tornado Alley, and spring is the time when storms arise from intersecting cold northern air and warm air from the gulf. I’ve never been in a tornado, although I’ve seen one from a distance, and I’ve sat many a night in front of the television watching the meteorologist track their paths across our city. But, I have had plenty of experience within the eye of a storm, sitting in the center of swirling samsara, where peace, rest, and stillness reside.  It all started in the middle of my life, affectionately known as a mid-life crisis, when I walked up to the door of a small, very unpretentious ranch house in my very conservative, traditional home town and knocked. A young woman answered and led me into a small room with a large altar of all things Indian, not the Creeks of Tulsa, but East Indian. I found her in the yellow pages under Transcendental Meditation…seriously. I had just finished a book on Ayurveda, ...