It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master
368
It Came from Beyond Zen!: More Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master
368Paperback
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781608685110 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 10/10/2017 |
| Pages: | 368 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Excerpt from INTRODUCTION
We came very close to losing Dōgen. When I first heard that Dōgen was a Japanese Buddhist monk and writer who lived 800 years ago, I just sort of assumed that meant that for the past 800 years the people of Japan had had Dōgen’s teachings as part of the philosophical underpinnings of their society, and that we in the West were just now learning about him.
Not so. For the first 700 or so years of their existence, Dōgen’s writings were barely known outside of a few dedicated monks at monasteries scattered throughout Japan. The general populace did not read them. They weren’t taught anywhere. The copies that existed mostly sat in the backs of temples slowly rotting away, unloved and neglected, food for mice and moths.
In the 18th century there was small revival of interest in Dōgen among Japanese scholars. But it took the Meiji Restoration of the late 19th century to get folks really looking into his work. History could easily have gone very differently. If Japan had not been forced to open itself to trade with the Americans, someone else — or even the Americans themselves — could have come into that tiny, unimportant, technologically backward island nation with modern weapons of war and taken over by force. It would’ve been a piece of cake! They could have demolished a great deal of Japan’s culture. So few copies of Dōgen’s writings existed at that time that it would have been easy to destroy all or at least most of his work forever.
Even with the way history actually went, it never fails to amaze me that it took centuries before the world was ready for what Dōgen was writing. It must have been lonely work, spending so much time and effort on a huge-ass book that he knew most of his contemporaries would not understand, one that he could not have been certain would manage to last long enough for the rest of the world to catch up to it.
I’ve always been a fan of so-called “cult” artists. I have an affinity for people who were unknown in their own time. But something like, let's say, “Pet Sounds,” the Beach Boys album that waited twenty years to finally be discovered by hipsters, can’t compare to a book that took centuries before it was ever even read by the wider public. At least “Pet Sounds” made the bottom of the music charts when it was new, before it sank into obscurity for a couple decades. Dōgen’s writings were unknown to anyone outside of his students during his lifetime. Did twenty people read Shōbōgenzō when Dōgen was alive? Fifty? Maybe. Mayyyyybe fifty. More than that? It’s very doubtful.
(FOOTNOTE: Some of Dōgen’s sayings from his lectures were preserved more carefully than his writings and were taught at certain Zen temples through the centuries. But it’s really in his extensive and detailed written work where Dōgen shines, and most of that stuff was put away and more-or-less forgotten not too long after he died.)
And we are still only at the very beginning of the wider international rediscovery of Dōgen. The first English translations only began to appear in the Seventies. Hell, I was already in the fifth grade when the first English translations of Dōgen started to show up at a few little Zen centers out on the West Coast, a long, long way from Wadsworth, Ohio, where I lived. By the time I was old enough to appreciate them, though, copies of those translations were already nearly impossible to come by at any price. I was there when my own teacher’s complete English translation of Shōbōgnezō first came off the printing presses in Tokyo. The book you’ve been reading represents one of the very first attempts by anyone outside of Japan to create a book about Dōgen aimed at an audience other than scholars and devout Buddhist converts.
When I think about what a doofus I am and how completely unqualified I am to even attempt to understand Dōgen, I realize I have somehow accidentally become part of something incredibly significant. That’s a funny feeling.
I don’t claim to be the final word on Dōgen. Far from it. Throughout this book I will constantly encourage you to look beyond what I’m giving you here. Please seek out the more orthodox translations and check them out for yourself. There is a depth and beauty to his writings that this book barely even hints at. But I also have to warn you, if you think the stuff you’ll be reading here is a brain-twister, you should see the more reliable translations.
With this book and some of my others, I am hoping to bring Dōgen’s ideas to a wider audience than they’ve ever had before. His philosophy shouldn’t just be something that a few academics and religious nuts jealously guard for themselves. Commentaries on them shouldn’t be buried in so many Brainiac buzzwords you have to stop and consult a dictionary every third page. His stuff is much too important for that. It needs to be exposed.
Dōgen is showing us a new and better way to understand ourselves and the world we live in. He’s showing us that the way we’ve been thinking about stuff for centuries borders on insanity. He’s showing us how to get sane.
Eihei Dōgen lived and died in Japan almost 800 years ago. And just in case you were wondering, Eihei is pronounced like the letter “A” followed by the word “hey” as in “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!” Dōgen is pronounced with a hard “G,” as in Godzilla — so it’s not Do-jen. Don’t ever say Do-jen around me! I’ll smack you! And if you want to be real fancy, the little line over the ō indicates that you hold that syllable for two beats instead of one. Japanese is very rhythmic. Each syllable is a specific length. Making them longer or shorter can change the meaning of a word.
His first name wasn’t even Eihei, by the way, nor was Dōgen his family name. No one knows for certain what name he was given when he was born, first or last. Dōgen was the dharma name bestowed upon him when he became a monk at around age 12, after which he never used his birth name again as far as we know. Eihei-ji was the name of the temple he founded much later. As the master of that temple he was called Dōgen of Eihei-ji, or Eihei Dōgen for short.
Dōgen was Japanese. Meaning he was from a country whose main exports these days are pornographic comic books and toy robots. In Dōgen’s day, the forerunners of today’s porno comics were just beginning to emerge in the form of naughty picture books printed from woodblocks, but toy robots were still a long way off. At the time Dōgen lived, Japan was generally regarded as an utterly insignificant island nation populated mostly by ignorant bumpkins who liked to dress up in weird costumes and slice each other up with swords. It was a long way from the economic powerhouse it briefly became in the 20th century.
Dōgen was the founder of the Japanese branch of the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism. For this he has been held in high regard as a famous figure for the past 800 years. And yet for most of that time almost nobody read Dōgen’s extensive writings about Zen practice and philosophy.
When I say he wrote a lot, I mean he wrote a lot a lot. Most contemporary versions of his masterwork, Shōbōgenzō, or “Treasury of the True Dharma Eye,” consists of 95 chapters, some of which are very long. As I said before, it’s a big-ass book!
Shōbōgenzō wasn’t even the only thing Dōgen wrote. He also wrote a number of shorter pieces about monastic rules and practices that were collected together centuries later, plus a bunch of poetry. And Dōgen’s students made notes during the talks he gave that were put together as Eihei Kōroku (Extensive Record of Eihei) and Shōbōgenzō Zuimonki (Diary of the True Dharma Eye Treasury).
Yet, for all this, his writings reached a miniscule audience when he was alive. Even so, he wrote as if he was addressing a vast audience. Who was he writing for? The means to publish his written work barely even existed when Dōgen was alive. What few copies did exist were made by hand. Yet he wrote anyway.
Dōgen was born in the year 1200 CE. This makes it very easy to figure out exactly how old he was at any given year listed in the dates he gives at the ends of most of his writings. Dōgen was the illegitimate son of a nobleman who was assassinated when Dōgen was two years old. His mother died when Dōgen was seven. He entered monastic practice at age 12 in the Tendai sect of Buddhism because he wanted to find out if there was something more to life than pain and heartbreak.
Dōgen, the young monk, had one question in particular that always troubled him. He asked the older monks and teachers, “Buddha said we are all perfect just as we are. So why do we have to do these strange practices like chanting, meditating, wearing robes and so on?”
No one could answer him. But he heard about a new temple that taught a form of Buddhism called Zen. The temple was called Kennin-ji. It was the first Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, where Dōgen lived, and only the second one in Japan. In 1217, at the age you and I were still in high school and our only concerns were acne and where to score weed, Dōgen went to that temple and became a monk there.
The difference between Tendai Buddhism and Zen Buddhism is that Tendai Buddhism tends to emphasize study and ritual whereas Zen Buddhism focuses on meditation practice.
In 1223, Dōgen accompanied the head teacher of that Zen temple, a guy named Myōzen, to China to learn about Zen practices there. At first Dōgen was disappointed in Chinese Zen. But in 1225 he met a teacher called Tendō Nyōjo (FOOTNOTE: This is the Japanese pronunciation of his name. When Japanese people read Chinese characters, they pronounce them differently from the way the Chinese do. The Chinese pronunciation is usually written in roman letters as Tiāntóng Rújìng. I prefer the Japanese pronunciations because that’s how I learned them.) who told him, “To practice the Way singleheartedly is, in itself, enlightenment. There is no gap between practice and enlightenment, or between zazen and daily life.” This impressed Dōgen and he became Tendō Nyōjo’s student.
In 1227, Tendō Nyōjo made Dōgen one of his dharma heirs. This means he publicly declared that Dōgen had an understanding equal to his own and gave him permission to teach independently. Soon after this, Dōgen returned to Japan. He then began writing about the practices he had seen in China and the philosophy he had learned from Tendō Nyōjo.
In 1233 he founded a temple in the city of Uji, near Kyoto, which was the capitol of Japan and the center of Buddhist study. Ten years later he moved to the remote province of Echizen (now called Fukui Prefecture) and started a temple called Eihei-ji. Some say that the reason he moved was because the leaders of the older, more established Buddhist temples were jealous of his growing popularity and forced him to leave Kyoto. There are even suggestions his life was in danger if he didn’t get out of Dodge.
He continued writing and revising Shōbōgenzō until he died in 1253 at the age of 53. He never completed Shōbōgenzō, but he produced about 84 finished chapters and about 11 other chapters that were nearly finished. Scholars argue about the exact number, and about which ones were intended as part of Shōbōgenzō and which ones were independent pieces. Plus, as late as the 1930’s, previously undiscovered writings of Dōgen’s were found. This raises the possibility that there might be other unknown writings by him still out there or that some pieces he wrote have been lost for all time when the only copies finally turned to dust in the back room of some temple.
Dōgen’s students established many temples throughout Japan. The Sōtō school of Zen became extremely popular. However, as I said, Dōgen’s book, Shōbōgenzō, was not widely read. Dōgen was revered as the founder of the sect, but that’s about it.
From 1633 until 1865, Japan closed its borders to outsiders. In 1865, the American Commodore Perry forced Japan to open itself to international trade. If you’ve seen the film The Last Samurai, it’s a fairly accurate portrayal of that time. Except Tom Cruise wasn’t really there.
Japan suddenly realized it was very much behind the rest of the world and needed to modernize. This led Japanese people to try to find Japanese things that were as good as similar things in Europe and America. This included philosophy and religion.
In 1925 a scholar named Tetsuro Watsuji published a book called Shamon Dōgen (the Monk Dōgen) in which he presented Dōgen as one of Japan’s most important philosophers. This led to a widespread rediscovery of Dōgen’s work. For the first time since he wrote Shōbōgenzō 700 years earlier, Dōgen’s book was being read by ordinary people, rather than just a few monks.
As I mentioned, the first English translations began to appear in the 1970’s. The first translation of the entire thing was by Kōsen Nishiyama and John Stevens. The second complete English translation of Shōbōgenzō was made by my teacher Gudo Wafu Nishijima and his student Mike Cross in the 1990’s. Since then two more complete English translations have appeared, one by Kazuaki Tanahashi and the folks at the San Francisco Zen Center, and one by Rev. Hubert Nearman of Shasta Abbey. Yūhō Yokoi of Aichigakuin University in Japan apparently also published a complete English translation, but good luck finding a copy. I have only ever been able to track down one volume of the dozen or so I believe exist. A few books in English have been written since then that have attempted to make Dōgen’s work accessible to non-scholars. I myself have written two of those, Sit Down and Shut Up and Don’t Be a Jerk. But we are still in the early days of this attempt.
I think one of the reasons it’s taken so long is because Dōgen was ahead of his time. He understood aspects of human nature that we take for granted today, but which there weren’t even words for in his time.
He says amazing stuff constantly. For example, he’ll point out that even the things that the traditional Buddhist sutras warn us against, like doubt and anger, take place within what the Buddhists call “original enlightenment.” Reality isn’t some pristine thing far off in outer space where there is no doubt or anger or greed or delusion. Reality is what you are living in at the very moment that you doubt you are living in reality.
But more than that, Dōgen takes the basic premise of Buddhism to its ultimate conclusion. And he does so fearlessly. He doesn’t accept any doctrine without question. He is the ultimate skeptic—he’s skeptical even of himself, his own senses, and his own conclusions. That kind of attitude would paralyze most people. Yet Dōgen manages to take that skepticism and turn it into something that’s freeing rather than paralyzing. It’s also a very contemporary attitude.
As a society we are only now getting close to the place that Dōgen was 800 years ago. We are watching all of our most basic assumptions about life, the universe, and everything come undone, just like Dōgen saw his world fall apart when his parents died….
Table of Contents
Introduction1. It Came from Beyond Zen! — (Inmo) It!
2. Don’t Be Half Assed — (Tenzō Kōkun) Instructions for the Cook
3. A Thousand Eyes and Hands of Compassion — (Kanon) Compassion
4. Compassion and Zen Buddhist Ethics
5. Four Good Ways to Treat People Right — (Shishōbō) Four All-Embracing Virtues
6. Eating Cornflakes and Doing the Dishes — (Kajo) Everyday Life
7. Garbage In, Garbage Out — (Jinshin Inga) Deep Belief in Cause and Effect
8. Wait! What Was the Deal with Cause and Effect Again? (Dai Shugyo) Great practice
9. Buddhist Super Powers — (Jinzū) Mystical Power
10. He Not Busy Being Born Is Busy Dying — (Shoji) Living and Dying
11. Does Life Exist?
12. A Willingness to See the Truth — (Doshin) The Will to the Truth
13.1 Needle in the Butt of Zazen Commentary Part 1
13.2 Needle in the Butt of Zazen Commentary Part 2
14. Talking to the Trees About Reality — (Mujō Seppō) The Insentient Preach the Dhrama
15. It’s All in the Mind, Or Is It? (San Gai Yui Shin) The Three Worlds Are Only the Mind
16. All You Have to Do is Dream — (Mu-chu Setsu-mu) Explaining a Dream Within a Dream
17. Giggling in Delight — Conclusion
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