On Offerings (Herreid)
(Sorry, not plum blossoms, but I haven’t taken any pictures of plum blossoms! If the “udumbara blossom and blue lotus blossoms are also one or two branches of the old plum tree’s blossoms” (582), then perhaps these unidentified blossoms can suffice.)
In reading “Plum Blossoms,” I was prompted to take a look back at “Tenzo Kyōkun.” In both “Plum Blossoms” and “Tenzo Kyōkun,” offerings are an essential theme. The activities of the tenzo are paralleled in the activities of the plum tree: both bring forth offerings, and in so doing they engage in the practice of enlightenment. In contrast to my superficial impression of Buddhism following my original reading of the Pāli canon, the Way-seeking mind is not inherently anti-relational. Instead, making offerings is key in one’s journey to enlightenment. In his various encounters with different tenzo in “Tenzo Kyōkun” and his descriptions of his master Rujing in “Plum Blossoms,” Dōgen has clearly been turned by his fellow practitioners, and he has subsequently turned all of us in this preceptorial.
“Blossoming is the old plum tree’s offering. The old plum tree is within the human world and the heavenly world. The old plum tree manifests both human and heavenly worlds in its treeness” (582). A plum tree is mundane in a sense, as it lives in the material world. However, there is something super-natural in its blossoming year after year. Similarly, the tenzo not only fills the bellies of his/her fellow monks, s/he also “nourishes the seeds of Awakening” (“Tenzo Kyōkun”). In its blossoming, the plum tree not only signifies spring, but without it, spring would not arrive: “To form billions of lands within blossoms and to bloom in the land is the gift of plum blossoms. Without the offering of plum blossoms there is no offering of rain or dew. The life vein consists of plum blossoms” (584). Just as the monastery would go hungry if the tenzo decided to take the day off, we depend on the plum tree’s treeness, if in a less obvious fashion.
In “Plum Blossoms,” Dōgen radically expands our idea of what offerings might look like. It is easier to understand what characterizes the offerings of a tenzo: we can imagine the careful attention and self-sacrifice required to serve others with a “motherly heart” (“Tenzo Kyōkun”), but the activities of the plum trees and the ways they turn us are more mysterious. Unlike humans, we don’t think of plum trees as acting with intention, and yet they still act, growing and transforming with the seasons year after year. Of course we also change over time, but Dōgen’s description of the plum trees makes me wonder what I may or may not be offering in my own transformation and activities. I know I can learn from the tenzo and from the plum tree, even if the details remain obscured for now. I’ll close with one last excerpt from “Tenzo Kyōkun”: “I hope that you will work and cook in this way, using this body which is the fruition of thousands of lifetimes and births to create limitless benefit for numberless beings” (“Tenzo Kyōkun”).
How beautiful! To see the blossoming as an offering, a gift, a display for the enjoyment of others is clearly relational and beneficent. I saw "the blossoming" as fullness or completion, but that does not seem dissimilar from an offering. An offering is something from the heart, sometimes a sacrifice, but it always seems to be an outpouring or sharing from the fullness within, which is expansive..."Because they bloom as offerings of plum blossoms, billions of blossoms are one family of plum blossoms." The expansiveness is both the individual blossom and spring. I love this post! Thank you
ReplyDeleteThis is helpful and beautiful. Don't you love how the word "marrow" enters in from time to time?
ReplyDelete"Unlike humans, we don’t think of plum trees as acting with intention, and yet they still act, growing and transforming with the seasons year after year."
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a trip up to Bandelier National Monument (the preserve near Los Alamos) to plant trees. A call went out from a non-profit on FB and a few friends and I drove up to help with the effort. The hills where we focused had been devastated by a forest fire a few years back and the land was left scarred and blackened, mostly devoid of plant life, save a few stubborn shrubs that I imagine had taken root in the time since the fire. We were given the most tender small sprouts, really just roots with some green fuzz bursting forth, to plant. The guide motioned to a nearby hill that had been spared the scorching, with trees dozens of feet high, broad branches, sturdy trunks. (I wish I could recall the type of tree... but, alas, I cannot.) He said that we were planting the same trees, but it would take years before they would be human height. Decades and decades to even come close to the expanse we saw on the other hill. It felt so meager to plant these tiny sprouts--many of which, we were told, probably wouldn't make it. Yet, there were such deliberate instructions on planting the trees in particular clusters with exact distancing. They needed to be in clusters, but of a very specific number (again, I wish I remembered the details!) If too many were too close, it would jeopardize the viability of all. Yet, if they were too sparse, this was dangerous too. The depth of each hole we dug to place the sprouts had also been calculated with care. The hodgepodge group of us, maybe 30 volunteers of all ages, took the directions to heart and set to work. This was September 2019 and last spring, during quarantine, I went up to hike in the area and to try to retrace my steps to find our little grove of fledgling trees, but I couldn't manage to find it. I'd like to think I could come back in a decade and check in on them, and perhaps I could contact the organization and find more detailed directions to the ridge. But there is also something beautiful about the time I spent wandering over the hills, wondering if that cluster of what seemed to be new and flourishing growth was our grove, then happening upon another area that might have been ours, only to further guess myself when I found another possible area. The exact demarcations of that area, defined so deliberately, has faded with time. This small space where we stuck our hands deep into the soil and gingerly placed each plant has rejoined the expanse of the multitude of hills and trees and plants. Perhaps they've transformed beyond recognition (or beyond my ability to recognize). Your post is helping me recall this experience and think of it, fondly, as an act of offering.