To "Study" the Buddha Way is to Study the Self

By: Bob Zeglovitch

At our last session, we looked some at what it means to be a student of the dharma. One of our jumping off places was the famous line In Dogen’s Genjokoan (often translated as Actualizing the Fundamental Point), “To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.” Shohaku Okumura, in his book Realizing Genjokoan, unpacks the meaning of “study”, in part through his translations of the Japanese word and Chinese character.

The Japanese word translated as “study” is “narau,” which originates from the word “nareru,” which means: “to get accustomed to”, “to become familiar with”, “to get used to”, “to become intimate with.”  Study is therefore much more than just the intellectual investigation of a subject, although it can certainly include that.

In the Chinese character, the upper part is a symbol for the wings of a bird and the lower part means “self.”  So, it points to studying something in the way a baby bird “studies” flying with its parents.  The baby bird possesses the potential to fly, but must watch its parents to learn how to actually perform the action of flying.  The baby watches and tries until can fly.  This is the meaning of study as in “to study the self.” 

Okumura also points out that when we truly practice or study the Self, there is no separation between I, self, Buddha Way, study and practice. When we practice the self, I is the self and there is no I apart from the activity of studying. Subject, object, and activity are all completely one thing. However, he kindly acknowledges that to speak, we must use concepts and language and say “I study the self,” or “I study the Buddha Way.”

The entire verse from Genjokoan reads:

To study the Buddha Way is to study the self.

To study the Self is to forget the self.

To forget the self is to be verified by all things.

To be verified by all things is to let the body and mind of the self and the body and mind of others drop off.

There is a trace of realization that cannot be grasped.

We endlessly express the ungraspable trace of realization.

Fukanzazengi: Thinking is Not Outside of the Way

By: Bob Zeglovitch

On some days when we sit, our minds may be relatively quiet.  On other days, there may be a profusion of thoughts.  The practice of shikantaza calls for us to be fully engaged and awake to both thinking and not thinking, as they present themselves, with our whole body-mind.  The point is to “show up,” awake for what is present. 

If our minds are quiet, we can engage that condition, seeing if we can do that without hanging on to it.  Perhaps we begin to notice a layer of subtle thinking that we could not see previously, or perhaps we taste the awareness from which thoughts emerge.  We may notice the pleasantness of this state and our desire for it to continue, seeing what it is like for it to end. 

If waves of thought come and go, we have the rare opportunity to come face to face, intimately, with thinking “just as it is.”  We spend much of our ordinary waking hours thinking, but most of the time we are truly unaware of our thoughts.  Also, there are many thoughts that we suppress in the midst of ordinary activity.  These may find their way to our awareness when we come to sitting.     

The terrain of thinking is wide and nuanced.  In our shikantaza practice (and the rest of our life), there can be obsessive thoughts, fragmented thoughts, complex ideas, dreamlike thoughts, fanciful thoughts, mean and dark thoughts, imaginative and creative thoughts, compassionate thoughts, greedy thoughts, fearful thoughts, shamelessly self-aggrandizing thoughts, thoughts of images, thoughts of emotion, complex ideations, thoughts of beauty, thoughts of dharma and enlightenment.  Sometimes our thinking may be a long and complex chain that unfolds with seeming deliberation and logic; at other times thoughts can flash in and out of our consciousness with striking rapidity, leaving karmic effects which we may not glimpse.  What a parade!    

If the “way is basically perfect and all-pervading” as Dogen states in the Fukanzazengi, then this parade of thoughts is of course very much a part of the way.  The continuous, moment to moment practice-realization that Dogen outlines does not seek to avoid this territory.  Sitting still, with awareness engaged and relatively stable, we can see delusions, grasping, moments of letting go, moments of hindrance and lack of hindrance, the mind that squirms and tries to escape and the mind that has equanimity.  As we leave thoughts alone, we see their impermanence and their not-self nature.  We see that there is no solid “I” that is creating the thoughts, or at least we can relax the sense of that “I”. 

In Body-and-Mind Study of the Way, a piece that Dogen wrote at about the same time that he wrote the edited version of the Fukanzazengi that we are studying, he makes quite clear that the world of thought is not separate from the enlightened mind.  He says:

 “[t]o study with the mind means to study with various aspects of mind, such as consciousness, emotion, and intellect….There is the thought of enlightenment, bits and pieces of straightforward mind, the mind of the ancient buddhas, everyday mind, the triple world which is one mind.  Sometimes you study the way by casting off the mind.  Sometimes you study the way by taking up the mind.  Either way, study the way with thinking, and study the way with not-thinking.”