My teacher, my body. (Diaz)

Mr. Huerta's comment toward the end of class that Dogen invites us to be at home struck a chord and pulled many things in tonight's reading to the foreground in me.

There are many words used to describe the body in this reading: marrow, bones, joints, face, smile, eye, eyebrow. Where can I be at home if not in my own body?  

"Rujing said:

                The original face is beyond birth and death.

                Spring in plum blossoms enters into a painting." (p 588)

The original face here seems NOT my own physical body. The lengthy discussion in class around the eyeball definitely left me with a deeper understanding of the metaphorical eye of perception. There is a balance in this reading of the physical, or concrete, with the metaphorical, or abstract. 

As Dogen wrestles with his own grief at the death of his teacher, the beauty of the plum blossom takes on new meaning for me. Plum blossoms are found on plum trees. "Blossoming is the old plum tree's offering." (582) Is the old plum tree Dogen's teacher? Page 589 says that Rujing opens up plum blossoms. Earlier on 587 the blossom is said to be a smile. 589 says that "plum blossoms initiate spring" a time of newness.

"The first day of the year is auspicious. 

Myriad things are all new. 

In prostration, the great assembly reflects: 

Plum blossoms open early spring." (586)

The plum tree makes sense as the teacher because it is the sustaining force, the home, the land, on which the plum blossom finds its own home. It can only blossom because of its position to the tree. It is the beauty, the smile, of the tree. The branch is described as the face where the smile radiates from. Plum blossoms being the eyeball have the element of sight. Where could they have gotten this if not from the tree, the teacher who caused them to blossom? Blossoming is an exposing of the inner stuff of the flower as the petals open up and take in the illumined sun, safely perched on their branch. Their spring season ushers in something auspicious and something connected to the myriad things where all things are now new. There is hope here. The blossom will always be a part of the tree.

Even as the blossom comes to the end of its season and falls from the tree, it is not alone. It has lived its season alongside countless other blossoms on the branches of the old plum tree. As the wind turns cold and wild, it shakes loose the blossoms and they become a fresh carpet of white covering the earth. There's action here. At one time they were unseen on the bare, naked branch. Then they were buds, then petals, then fully bloomed, then fallen, finally withered. Just like in my physical body, there is a cycle. A pushing and a pulling, like a skilled hand pushing an eyebrow, maybe. 

The teacher offers a place for me to rest. He teaches me to practice. "Practicing thoroughly one branch and practicing thoroughly five petals is plum-blossoms-in-snow authentically receiving, entrusting, and encountering. Turning the body and mind inside the ceaseless murmuring of just one branch" (586) My body is a place for my mind to be at home and rest, to receive what my teacher has to pass on entrust to me. All the things he has encountered, I get to encounter. His gift to me is newness, blossoming, a place on the branch to experience the sun.

The teacher, a steady tree, unmovable, unshakable, rooted, through the many ages and cycles of blossoms, still the tree, remains. But Dogen's teacher, in his physical body, is gone. He must not be the tree after all. The tree must be the thing inside the earthly teacher, the student, all the blossoms, the thing that remains and is passed heir to heir.....the teacher of teachers.