61. Zuimonki: Being a Monk
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Renunciation
is not simply leaving home —
it is homelessness!
Master Dogen was quite prolific as a writer, even by today’s standards. But we should remember that writing in those days, as well as publishing, was accomplished with rice paper, brushes and ink. Imagine what he might have done with a word processor. He apparently intended his master work, Shobogenzo, which tends to overshadow his other writings, to consist of 100 fascicles, or chapters, but he completed only 95 in his brief lifetime of 53 years.
At a conference on Eihei Dogen around 2000 in Palo Alto, after his signature lecture on Dogen’s collection of 300 koans, called the Mana Shobogenzo, I asked John Daido Loori, What could the other five have possibly been about? The old modern master huffed, “Good point!” and walked away.
This collection, subtitled as “Sayings of Eihei Dogen Zenji recorded by Koun Ejo” in a small volume published by the Soto sect in Japan, was translated by one of my teachers, Shohaku Okumura Roshi. I have selected a couple of examples from the six “books” of live teachings, and will number them for your future reference. I hope you delve into these wonderful postcards from the past in greater detail.
1-2 Dogen also said,
[You] should maintain the precepts and eating regulations (one meal a day before noon, etc.). Still, it is wrong to insist upon them as essential, establish them as a practice, and expect to be able to gain the Way by observing them. We follow them just because they are the activities of Zen monks and the lifestyle of the Buddha’s children. Although keeping them is good, we should not take them as the primary practice. I don’t mean to say, however, that you should break the precepts and become self-indulgent. Clinging to such an attitude is an evil view and not that of a Buddhist practitioner. We follow the precepts of regulations simply because they form the standard for a Buddhist and are the tradition of Zen monasteries. While I was staying at Chinese monasteries, I met no one who took them as the primary concern.
So the great master, while lecturing to monks living at a monastery, insists that the strict protocols of monastic life are not the primary practice of a monk. That central position is reserved for zazen itself.
This tells us, as lay practitioners, that the lifestyle of the monastic, which we may hold in high esteem, and even long to emulate, is not crucial. We remember from Jijuyu Zammai — Self-fulfilling Samadhi — “Without engaging in incense offering, bowing, chanting Buddha’s name, repentance and reading scripture, you should just wholeheartedly sit, and thus drop away body and mind.” The various rituals are the peripherals, plug-and-play supportive activities surrounding the true teaching found in meditation. The lifestyle of the householder is likewise not central to living a Zen life. Zazen alone is:
For true attainment of the Way, devoting all effort to zazen alone has been transmitted among the buddhas and patriarchs. For this reason, I taught a fellow student of mine… a disciple of Zen Master Eisai, to abandon his strict adherence of keeping the precepts and reciting the Precept Sutra day and night.
It looks like Dogen, while a student, played a somewhat subversive role in respect to his Dharma brothers. It reminds me of the tale of the young visiting junior monks, unsui, whom the abbot admonished not to go “imitating the senior monks around here.” When they saw him following the same protocols, they confronted him with the contradiction, to which he said, “I just have my devotion this way.” He was not imitating anyone. Dogen is attributed with asking, “In zazen, what precept is not fulfilled?” Wholehearted practice is not dependent upon the circumstances of our daily life. The real monastery has no walls. But regarding monastic life, Dogen’s wheelhouse, the master had a lot to say:
1-21 Dogen instructed,
Students of the Way, you must be very careful on several levels in giving up worldly sentiment. Give up the world, give up your family, and give up your body and mind. Consider this well. Even among those who retreat from the world and live secluded in the mountains or forests, there are some who fear that their family, which has continued for many generations, will cease to exist, and who become anxious for their family members or their relatives.
This deals with renunciation. Members of many spiritual sects are known as renunciants, turning their back on the normal family and social lives of the times, becoming hermits or mendicants. In any time this would represent a radical departure from the societal norms, including its mores and memes. The fundamental purpose of one’s life would be re-examined, giving and extremely new meaning to the notion of the “unexamined life” not being worth living. Master Dogen would often focus our attention in zazen like a laser, exhorting us to examine his teachings thoroughly in practice, i.e. mainly in meditation.
Although some people depart from home and give up family or property, they have not yet given up their bodies if they think that they should not do anything physically painful and avoid practicing anything which may cause sickness, even through they know it to be the Buddha-Way.
Here I have experienced a trick of the memory, which modern studies have apparently proven is a dependable attribute of long-term memory — that it is not dependable. That is, we unconsciously modify and embellish our memories over time, e.g. to polish our self-image, or to make them more meaningful. In this case, I remembered this section as Master Dogen outlining several levels of monks, and how he evaluated them in terms of their ability to do true renunciation. Here I find no specifics of that construct as I recall, and have been freely paraphrasing. Continuing with the last bit as published in this edition:
Further, even if they carry out hard and painful practices without clinging to their bodily lives, if their minds have not yet entered the Buddha-Way and if they resolve not to act against their own will even if such actions are the Buddha-Way, they have not yet given up their minds.
In my revisionist memory, Dogen expresses ranking monastics in a holarchy of renunciation. The first-level renunciant does what I interpret as outward renunciation: turning their back on the social world, physically leaving home, and donning the clothing and appearance of a monastic. But s/he is unable to actually let go of attachment to family, and/or may harbor secret yearnings for fame and fortune, or status.
The second level can actually reject the blandishments of society and the security and comfort of the family tree, which I refer to as physical renunciation. But this person cannot forsake clinging to the comforts of a healthy body, and put their own life on the line for the sake of Zen.
The third level adept is able to lay down their life and limb for the sake of the mendicant lifestyle. But they are unable to give up their own willful opinion of all the above. For example, they may be able to perform the abandonment of home and hearth, health and longevity, but they may nourish a certain self-image, taking pride in their accomplishments. This is monkey-mind.
If, however, unlike the monkey, they are able to release their grip on all the cookies in the jar, thus liberating themselves from their own clinging mind, they may accede to the highest level in Dogen’s hierarchy. At this point, they have done true renunciation, seeing through all the various dimensions of their life, and especially the delusional aspect of their own construct of what it means. Thus, the highest becomes the lowest, and the householder becomes identical with the monastic. If, in the midst of everyday life, with all its complexity, we can still manage to see through to the underlying emptiness, we need not abandon it in favor of the monastic model.
Another comment on this came in response to a question raised by a nun in the congregation of Dogen:
3-2 Once, a certain nun asked,
“Even lay women practice and study the buddha-dharma. As for nuns, even though we have some faults, I feel there is no reason to say that we go against the buddha-dharma. What do you think?”Dogen admonished,
“This is not a correct view. Lay women might attain the Way as a result of practicing the buddha-dharma as they are. However, no monk or nun attains it unless he or she has the mind of one who has left home. This is not because the buddha-dharma discriminates between one person and another, but rather because the person doesn’t enter the dharma. There must be a difference in the attitude of lay people and those who have left home. A layman who has the mind of a monk or nun who has left home will be released from samsara. A monk or nun who has the mind of a lay person has double faults. Their attitudes should be quite different. It is not that it is difficult to do, but to do it completely is difficult. The practice of being released from samsara and attaining the Way seems to be sought by everyone, but those who accomplish it are few. Life-and-death is the Great Matter, impermanence is swift. Do not let your mind slacken. If you abandon the world, you should abandon it completely. I don’t think that the names provisionally used to distinguish monks and nuns from lay people are at all important.”
I quote Dogen without omission because I frankly cannot see that any part of his response is not germane and important to our understanding of lay versus monastic practice. He profiles this as a choice, but insists that we are either all-in, or we are not. However he does not indicate that just because one chooses one way or the other, one is not superior or inferior to the other. It depends.
Wholehearted practice does not depend on the choice so much as the commitment. Half-baked practice in either case would seem to be the point of what the translators refer to as an admonition. Because Dogen is sometimes characterized as the “father” of Soto Zen in Japan, and mistakenly characterized as overly stern, severe and authoritarian, I would respectfully submit that these instructions are like those given to a child, in the sense of compassionate guidance, or tough love, and not at all condescending, or admonishing. He is not taking sides or advising this nun, and by extension ourselves, as to which way is right for us. He is only encouraging us to recognize the path we walk, and not to confuse the one with the other. Followed to where they are leading, either way works. All roads on the Original Frontier lead to nirvana. Eventually.
Master Dogen touches on this point again in later references in Zuimonki, but we do not have time to comment on all of them. In 4-3, for example he reiterates, “The primary point you should attend to is detaching yourself from personal views. To detach yourself from personal views means to not cling to your body.” And later in the same section, “…if you have not detached from the mind which clings to your body, it is like vainly counting up another’s wealth without possessing even a half-penny of your own. I implore you to sit quietly and seek the beginning and the end of this body on the ground of reality.” Here we find another aphorism we might have assumed to be Western or biblical in origin. But the great master could as easily have been addressing these comments to a lay audience, rather than to his coterie of monks and nuns. And again, the way, the method for both, is, as always, zazen.
In another instance, in 5-20, he quotes an ancient master who said, “At the top of a hundred foot pole, advance one step further.” He goes on to reinforce his point with this familiar Zen trope:
This means you should have the attitude of someone who, at the top of a hundred-foot pole, lets go of both hands and feet; in other words, you must cast aside body and mind.
There are various stages involved here. Nowadays, some people seem to have abandoned the world and left their homes. Nevertheless, when examining their actions, they still haven’t truly left home, or renounced the world.
As a monk who has left home, first you must depart from your ego as well as from [desire for] fame and profit. Unless you become free from these things, despite practicing the Way urgently as though extinguishing a fire enveloping your head… it will amount to nothing but meaningless trouble, having nothing to do with emancipation.
Here we find the famous “hair on fire” trope we think originated with Dogen but now ubiquitous as the image of extreme urgency and intensity. This is followed by a rather long critique of the ignorance and misguided attitudes of recalcitrant and phony monks of the time, which we sometimes imagine to be a modern anomaly. But people are people, and were no different in Dogen’s day. Note the restatement, found elsewhere, of the idea that unless your commitment is total, Zen practice may be a waste of time.
As a final note, it should be mentioned that in many parts of his oeuvre, Dogen promotes the monastic alternative. In his times, as it is today, it was probably more difficult for a lay person, man or woman, to maintain a practice of meditation and Dharma study than for a cloistered monk or nun. In 6-9 he likens entering a monastery to passing through the “Dragon-Gate… where vast waves rise incessantly. Without fail, all fish once having passed through this place become dragons.” But he goes on to say,
The vast waves there are not different from those in any other place, and the water is also ordinary salt water. Despite that, mysteriously enough, when fish cross that place, they all become dragons. Their scales do not change and their bodies stay the same; however, they suddenly become dragons.
I take his meaning to be that all of us, wherever we find ourselves, are surfing the vast waves of samsara that are rising incessantly all around us. And we are all capable of undergoing this mysterious change, passing through the gateless gate, that is nothing more or less than returning to our original nature, while nothing else changes. He goes on to point out that the monastery — sorin in Japanese, which connotes a place pf practice in the forest — is “not a special place.” In transforming samsara to nirvana, our practice converts the mundane to the sacred, and vice-versa. My world and welcome to it (shout out to James Thurber), the monastery without walls.
Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston
Elliston Roshi is guiding teacher of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center and abbot of the Silent Thunder Order. He is also a gallery-represented fine artist expressing his Zen through visual poetry, or “music to the eyes.”
UnMind is a production of the Atlanta Soto Zen Center in Atlanta, Georgia and the Silent Thunder Order. You can support these teachings by PayPal to donate@STorder.org. Gassho.
Producer: Kyōsaku Jon Mitchell
