UnMind 107. Three Treasures Design II — Atlanta Soto Zen Center

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Designing Dharma
Dharma was the point
Of 2500 years —
And forever more.

Matsuoka Roshi would often say that most people go through life with something missing; they don’t know what it is, but they definitely know it’s missing. Finally, he said, they come to Zen to find it. Zazen is, of course, not the only way to penetrate the truths of existence, but as Sensei claimed, any method that works — yoga, prayer, philosophy, martial arts, chanting, etc. — “will have something of Zen in it.” He would often mention examples of undivided attention in sports, like baseball —e.g. Willie mays — as evidence of the focus factor of Zen. Master Dogen expressed something similar, in a passage with which I am sure Matsuoka Roshi was familiar:

When dharma does not fill your whole body and mind you think it already sufficient
When dharma fills your body and mind you understand that something is missing

Following this remarkable assertion in Genjokoan—Actualizing the Fundamental Point, he goes into a long analogy of the ocean appearing to be circular from our perspective when no land is in sight, and how all things are like this:

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions
You see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.

This “eye of practice,” vintage Dogen coinage, comes close to giving us a clue as to what Dharma is, and how we should expect to apprehend it in our own direct experience, rather than as a concept or belief. The implication is that our eye of practice can become more discerning through, well, practice. Nowadays we interpret Zen practice as indicating meditation itself, but of course it is all-inclusive of the various dimensions of life, as outlined in Buddha’s original Eightfold Path, a kind of prescription for practice.

In another passage, Eihei Koso Hotsuganmon—Dogen’s Vow, the great Master and Founder of Soto Zen in Japan indicates that the Dharma is a trans-sensory phenomenon, not limited to an object of perception as such:

We vow with all beings from this life on throughout countless lives
To hear the true Dharma
That upon hearing it no doubt will arise in us
Nor will we lack in faith

“Hearing the true Dharma” does not imply hearing someone preaching the Dharma anymore than “seeing” what our eye of practice can reach implies visual perception. This is the “see” of “I see what you mean.” My best friend in high school used to say, with a mischievous grin, “Yes, but do you mean what I see?”

You could make the case for “feeling” the true Dharma as well, and go beyond the senses in your embrace of the Dharma as having to do with sensation altogether, as Master Dogen mentions in Jijuyu Zammai—Self-fulfilling Samadhi after a long, effusive description of realization:

When for even a moment you express the Buddha’s seal
By sitting upright in Samadhi
The whole phenomenal world becomes the Buddha’s seal
And the entire sky turns into enlightenment
All this however does not appear within perception
Because it is unconstructedness in stillness
It is immediate realization

So by this we are to understand that expressing or hearing the true Dharma is a transformational experience, not subject to ordinary understanding. But this should not surprise us; what, of all the many phenomena we experience on a daily basis, can we be said to truly understand? That the Dharma is beyond understanding does not mean that it is not real, or that it must be unimportant. We do not “understand” birth, or death, nor most of what happens in-between.

At this point you may want to shout, in exasperation, “Please stop talking about Dharma and just tell me what it is!” If Dharma is beyond understanding, yet accessible to awareness, it is certainly beyond concepts, and far beyond words. Which brings up the central stanza from Tozan’s Hokyo Zammai—Precious Mirror Samadhi:

Although it is not constructed it is not beyond words
Like facing a precious mirror
Form and reflection behold each other
You are not it but in truth it is you

So this unconstructed dimension of reality can be pointed at, if not captured, in words. Which explains the written record of some 84,000 sutras and the vast body of commentary on them from India, China and Japan. When it comes to the instructions for meditation, which Zen claims to transmit the method of Buddha himself, the words are not pointing at a description of reality, but rather offering a prescription for a do-it-yourself approach to entering into the true Dharma directly, through whole body-mind immersion.

So as Pogo the Possum famously reminds us, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The Dharma is already present in its multifarious manifestations, from the world of nature as well as the machinations of human kind, and beyond to the unlimited, inconceivable universe. The only thing coming between the true Dharma and ourselves is our own ignorance, both innocent and willful.

It may help to consider the contrarian position that we already hear the true Dharma, that in fact we cannot hear anything but the true Dharma. Elsewhere I have argued that anything and everything we hear has to be dukkha, the universal dynamic of change that we human beings interpret as “suffering.” In order to hear any sound, the sound has to emanate from some level of change. No change, no sound. Similarly, we can assume that any sound we hear, including that of human voices, constitutes an instance of Dharma. It cannot be otherwise. Confusion sets in when we understand the language that the human voice is speaking, particularly if they are speaking of the Dharma. Instead of witnessing the concrete event that happens to be producing intentional sounds directed toward illuminating the Dharma, we find ourselves bogged down in the dualistic concepts being expressed in language, which is inherently dualistic in nature. Both things can be true at the same time, as the popular trope has it.

The design of Dharma would then relate only to the spoken and written teachings, perhaps extending to the establishment of temples, monasteries and Zen centers as intentionally promulgating and propagating the practice. When we read the record of Buddha’s teachings, or sutras, assuming that they capture the events fairly accurately, we can see that the format for their live presentation was similar to the ubiquitous talk show of today. Typically a member of the Order would interview the sage, asking questions for the benefit of the audience. Occasionally Buddha would have a guest or two sharing the couch.

Our charge and challenge today is the same. How we present the Dharma to today’s audience will be the determining factor in its acceptance, assimilation, and effect upon the denizens of our world. In my opinion, Zen may be one of the few hopes we have for world peace in an increasingly mad world. How we introduce Zen to the madding crowd and whether we can make it accessible to all levels of society will greatly condition the influence that the “compassionate teachings” have on the future. This is why we emphasize householder Zen, rather than the monastic model, in the Silent Thunder Order.

If the Dharma were dependent upon a specific lifestyle or mode of living in the world, it would not be the Dharma. Imagine a world in which Zen has not yet been discovered and the method of its transmission is yet to be invented and designed. The bare manifestation of reality is still the Dharma. Or even further, a world on which there are no human beings to “hear” or “meet” the true Dharma, as we are told was the case a mere 250 to 300,000 years ago. The Dharma was already operative in that inchoate world.

Dharma has many connotations. A couple that are indicative of its deeper meaning are that of a “being” — from a minute particle to the largest galaxy; and that of “law” — as in natural law, or the way reality works. In this latter definition it is close to a principle of physics, or Taoism’s the “Way.” So Dharma as “teachings” in the form of words is merely pointing at the true Dharma that transcends words.

But language is one of the most powerful and precise media that we have available to convey meaning But in communications design, the message is the message received, not the message sent. Master Dogen was a master of the language, as was Matsuoka Roshi, doubling down in his non-native tongue of English. That these past masters used language instead of being used by it makes them exemplars of the approach to solving the problem of propagation of Zen today. In literary circles the advisory trope is “Write what you know.” The key to being able to share the Dharma assets is to hear, or meet the true Dharma, oneself. In a “publish or perish” climate, we can expect to find a lot of folks rushing into print at their first inkling into what they think they recognize as the Dharma, or its corollary in their vernacular.

That there is a true Dharma implies that there can be a false Dharma, or many such anomalies. Or we may quote one of the ancient but timely Ch’an poems on the subject, Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind:

There is one Dharma, not many
Distinctions arise from clinging ignorance

Once the subject of Dharma is identified and introduced into the vernacular, it becomes subject to the same distortions as any other topic of discourse. Zen offers a refreshing approach to this dilemma. We say with Dogen, in Fukanzazengi—Principles of Seated Meditation:

You should stop pursuing words and letters
Learn to withdraw and shine the light on yourself
When you do so your body and mind will drop away
And your original Buddha nature will appear

Note that taking Dogen’s “backward step” is the opposite of attempting to understand by pursuing linguistic concepts. It is also, fundamentally, the opposite of “doing.” This is the intersection of Buddha and Dharma. By engaging in an intentional act of non-action, thinking non-thinking, and doing non-doing, the natural process of realization can take place. Do your best to do nothing about this.

In the next segment we will take up the third leg of the stool, that of Sangha, the harmonious community.