In Episode 272, I discussed the third chapter of Zen Master Keizan’s book The Denkoroku, or the Record of the Transmission of Illumination. In the interest of thoroughness, I figured I’d start back at chapter one, with Shakyamuni Buddha’s “I and All Beings.” This text explores the nature of enlightenment and the tension between individuality and non-separation.
Preface: Balancing Two Kinds of Dharma Study
Studying the Denkoroku
Shakyamuni’s Spiritual Search and Awakening
Shakyamuni’s “I and All Beings”
You People are Gautama’s Eyes
The Undying Person in this Hermitage
Preface: Balancing Two Kinds of Dharma Study
Before I get started, I want to say a brief word about two kinds of Dharma Study. Applied study has to do with the “relative” or “dependent dimension” of practice (see Episodes 257 and 258 for more about absolute and relative, or what I call the independent and dependent dimensions of Reality). Dependent dimension study is about the application of the teachings in our lives and the manifestation of our values, intentions, aspirations, and insights. It’s important to talk about our tools of practice – zazen, precepts, Sangha, mindfulness – how you engage them and what you can learn from them. The Zen fields of Ending Dukkha, Opening Your Heart, and Bodhisattva Activity are concerned largely with the dependent dimension of Reality.
The other kind of Dharma Study involves exploring ultimate truth, the “independent dimension” of Reality. Ultimate as an adjective has several meanings relevant to our discussion (these from Dictionary.com): “maximum; decisive; conclusive: the ultimate authority,” or “highest; not subsidiary: ultimate goal in life,” or “basic; fundamental; representing a limit beyond which further progress, as in investigation or analysis, is impossible: the ultimate particle.” [i] Dharma Study focused on ultimate truth challenges us to keep opening up to the deeper truths that pervade our life and all existence.
Ideally, a spiritual path balances applied study and study focused on ultimate truth. Our practice suffers when we neglect discussions of application, such as moral behavior and practicing with our human relationships. It’s essential to help one another learn how to make our practice beneficial to self and others and to acknowledge the challenges we face when doing this. However, we can also dwell too much on manifestation and application – occupying ourselves entirely with the endless task of learning to embody the Dharma in our lives. In the process, we may end up sticking to what we already know or studying only those teachings and practices that we recognize as being immediately applicable to our daily life. We may end up avoiding the challenge of teachings that defy our immediate grasp and thereby miss out on discovering what we have not yet dreamt of.
Studying the Denkoroku
In the interest of balance, then, I offer this episode on the first chapter of Keizan’s Denkoroku as study aimed at experiencing ultimate truth.
By way of intro to Keizan’s Denkoroku – because I didn’t do this in Episode 272: Keizan Jokin is one of the most important ancestors in Soto Zen. He was four Dharma generations after Dogen: Koun Ejo was Dogen’s Dharma heir, followed by Tetsu Gikai and then Keizan. His teaching style was rather different than Dogen’s, such that in the Japanese Soto School it is said Dogen is the “father” of Soto Zen while Keizan is its “mother.” Keizan wasn’t as prolific as Dogen in terms of writing, but his Denkoroku is treasured. This text is one of many “transmission of the lamp” volumes composed in Chan and Zen – stories of interactions between teachers and students over the generations that record the significant obstacles and breakthroughs of each student. The Denkoroku tells the story of each Dharma ancestor in Keizan’s lineage, from Shakyamuni Buddha all the way to Koun Ejo, for 53 stories in all.
Transmission of the lamp collections are essentially collections of koans, or teaching stories, compiled and passed down by our Dharma ancestors because there is something important going on in each story that we should pay attention to. Sometimes the significance of the stories, interactions, imagery – or the language employed in them – may seem rather obscure or baffling. However, engaging such texts with patience and imagination usually allows them to open up for you after a time. T. Griffith Foulk is the editor-in-chief of the translation of the Denkoroku I will be using, and he says this in a section of the book’s introduction, “About the Translation” (I include such a long quote here because it so beautifully captures what I have often tried to communicate about Zen literature):
“The literature of Chan or Zen, including the writings of the Soto School ancestors Dogen and Keizan, is rightly famous for its witty, paradoxical, and often confounding use of language. Zen masters employ such linguistic devices, it could be said, to make us realize the inherent limitations and pitfalls of language itself, especially when we use it to try to grasp what is “ultimately real” (a notion that itself is just another linguistic construct). There is a profound difference, however, between the rhetoric of Zen that plays with language in a clever and calculated way to induce insight, and language that is merely confused and nonsensical. Unfortunately, because readers of Chan and Zen texts are accustomed to sage remarks that appear to be non sequiturs, when they are confronted by the garden variety of nonsense – e.g. the gibberish that results when mechanical translation is employed or quotation marks go missing – they are all too likely to chalk that up as normal for the language of Zen, which (they imagine) is not supposed to be comprehensible in the first place. Such a mode of reading, Zen Master Keizan tells is in the Denkoroku, is a serious mistake. He repeatedly exhorts his followers to strive “meticulously” to fully understand the Zen stories and sayings that he raises for their consideration. Implicit in that exhortation is the idea that they do, in fact, make sense.”[ii]
Of course, the “sense” that Zen texts make is not exactly the kind of “sense” we’re used to. As I’ve mentioned before on the podcast, it may be helpful to think of some Zen literature as describing a dream. Within the dream, things make sense, even though they may be drastically different than your waking reality, including the laws of physics, personal identity, and the way time works. Some dreams have profound significance, even if it doesn’t work to take them literally or even to interpret them too logically. Within the world of a dream, you can ask yourself what it means that you can fly, or that a long-dead relative visits you, or that you realize natural objects like trees or birds are a form of writing. When trying to understand particularly poetic Dharma texts, it’s good to wrestle with the words but also let go of your usual ways of trying to make sense of things.
I will be reading from a translation of the Denkoroku, or Record of the Transmission of Illumination, edited by T. Griffith Foulk. The two-volume text isn’t cheap; it includes a glossary in a second volume – longer than the text itself – and is available through the University of Hawaii press for $85. However, the Soto Shu (Japanese Soto School) has made a pdf of the text with footnotes available on their website, albeit with a watermark.
I will not read the entire chapter on Shakyamuni, but will share approximately half of the text, with my reading interspersed with reflections. [I will not reproduce the text here, but will offer notes telling you which page of the Soto Shu website pdf the reading is from; in the Foulk translation, the Shakyamuni chapter is not Chapter One, but called the “Lead Chapter.”]
Shakyamuni’s Spiritual Search and Awakening
[Denkoroku Lead Chapter, Page 2 is read aloud in the podcast]
Setting aside for the moment the words Shakyamuni speaks upon his awakening, let’s explore the significance of him leaping over the walls of his father’s palace and taking up the life of a spiritual mendicant. At the core of our practice is a spiritual search. What are we seeking? Why? What brings us to seek? Most of us have stopped short of the dramatic actions the Buddha took in order to devote himself to practice, but is there a small part of you that thinks that maybe that’s what’s called for?
Then the Buddha (not yet a Buddha) sat still for so long a magpie made a nest on top of his head. Have you witnessed how long it takes for a bird to build a nest? It comes and goes for the better part of a week, flying off to collect twigs or strands of hair and then spending a considerable amount of time weaving them into the nest. Presumably Shakyamuni also let the magpie lay its eggs and raise its young on top of his head, remaining so still he never scared the birds away. What is so important that a person would do this? What internal landscape would be so captivating? What is so important about silence and stillness?
After practicing austerities for six years, Keizan says the Buddha sat six more years, and then let out his very first “lion’s roar,” or Dharma teaching. After six years, something changed. The Buddha found what he was looking for. What do you think that was? What do you hope it was?
Let’s become conscious of how we think about Shakyamuni Buddha, about ourselves, and about enlightenment. Shakyamuni was a person who may or may not have existed. Let’s say he did exist. He did spiritual practice, he was really adept at it, and at one point he had a profound realization. Or maybe he had lots of smaller realizations, it doesn’t really matter. At some point they added up and he realized stuff you and I can’t even imagine. It gave him great perspective and freedom, peace of mind, compassion, and equanimity.
Then he taught others the path he followed. Subsequently, others have awakened to the same thing he did, more or less. Now you, a fairly ordinary person living in a globalized, industrialized society Shakyamuni couldn’t have imagined, are studying the Dharma. You may or may not achieve the insight Shakyamuni attained. You may or may not even want to. It is not a bad thing to think this way. Any piece of Zen can be useful. But if we want to challenge ourselves, to explore ultimate truth, to keep growing, we should examine what Keizan is saying.
When you view awakening or enlightenment from the perspective of the dependent dimension – the dimension of time, space, individuality, and causality – it may appear that enlightenment is an experience an individual has at some point in time. There is a time before the realization, when they are deluded and experience dukkha, and there is a time after, when they become conscious of their insight, see the Reality-with-a-Capital-R, and experience spiritual liberation. If I experience Enlightenment, I can’t give it to you. I may be able to teach you the methods I used to awaken, but you have to practice and experience it yourself. Shakyamuni left us a path, but each of us has to follow it ourselves in order to experience what he did.
In the rest of this chapter on Shakyamuni, Keizan is pointing us toward awakening as viewed along the independent dimension of Reality – the timeless, dimensionless, boundaryless, seamless things-as-it-is of this moment. Now it’s really time to go into a dreamlike realm!
Shakyamuni’s “I and All Beings”
[Denkoroku Lead Chapter, Pages 4&5 are read aloud in the podcast]
Enlightenment is not what we think it is. Self is not what we think it is. Time is not what we think it is. Realizing all of this is enlightenment.
Koan language, teachings about ultimate truth – these will not be immediately accessible or understandable. Often poetic and befuddling, the words point to something beyond or beneath the obvious.
What is the meaning of Shakyamuni’s words, “I, together with the great earth and sentient beings, simultaneously attain the way?” Maybe he’s saying that by discovering a path upon his enlightenment, he has assured that everyone else can attain enlightenment eventually, so if you ignore separation in time, in a sense everyone attains enlightenment together? No. (Or yes, in a sense, but that’s too shallow an interpretation.)
What kind of thing can we share with all beings on earth? We know there is something… or we know there are infinitely many things… and yet as soon as we define such things, they become limited. Maybe we think, “Ah, we all share aliveness, or awareness.” And yet Keizan speaks not only of sentient beings but of the “great earth.” The earth is not aware the way a sentient being is. When we try to imagine what we might share with all beings, we are still thinking of an “I” who is separate from all beings, from Buddha.
Let’s dream our way into the imagery… “I” is not Shakyamuni, even he comes from this “I.” “I” gives birth to all beings and even to the great earth itself. Imagine you are dreaming, and this is the case. Later you will describe it to someone, realizing in retrospect how strange it sounds, how it doesn’t really make any sense, how describing it in words is awkward and inaccurate. But while you were in the dream it made perfect sense. You might say:
I met Shakyamuni Buddha, and I had realized everything he had realized. I understood that we all – like, every being and every thing – shared the same nature, or – not really shared a nature, as if we each have a piece of it, but like we were all part of one organism. No, not exactly – it’s not like there was some vast organism you could point to, separate from me and Buddha and all things, but more like whatever was animating me was fundamentally no different than what was animating you. Anyway, it was really cool. I had this sense of connection or non-separateness even while I still had my individuality.
We want to transcend our sense of separateness, to be one, to belong, to be connected, to be part of something greater. At times we may practice hard, meditate, seek peak experiences, even take drugs, to merge back into the one – to shed our sense of “I” and partake of Shakyamuni’s enlightenment, to allow the Buddha’s eye to become us, to drop the differentiation between self and other, to transcend even the sense of “together” or “One” (which still involves separateness experiencing). But we also want to be ourselves, to be individuals, to be free and autonomous, to experience and act. The will toward oneness and the will toward individuality seem to be incompatible… What is this tension between oneness and separateness?
You People are Gautama’s Eyes
[Denkoroku Lead Chapter, Pages 5&6 are read aloud in the podcast]
A possible alternative translation of the first sentence of this section, according to the footnotes, is “Do not think that Shakyamuni Buddha attained the way.” The “way” we are speaking of involves Realization of Reality, which includes both the dependent and independent dimensions. However, as I discuss in Episode 290 –Realization: Direct Experience of Reality-with-a-Capital-R, there is a sense in which ultimate truth is more true that relative truth, just because it involves a larger perspective – like the reality of a hand is more true than that of a separate finger, because the hand includes and depends on separate fingers but gives them context and meaning. Similarly, although in one sense awakening involves a sentient being waking up to something, in a larger sense there is no one to awaken and no alternative reality to awaken to. “Do not regard Shakyamuni Buddha [or anyone who awakens] as apart from the great earth and sentient beings.”
Then Keizan says, “Even though mountains and rivers and the great earth – all the myriad, interconnected phenomena – are like a dense forest, none avoid being within Gautama’s eyes. All of you people are also standing within Gautama’s eyes.” “The mountains, rivers, and the great earth” surely is meant as an all-inclusive description of this world in which we live. Keizan didn’t include skyscrapers, computers, and cars, but these are also “myriad, interconnected phenomena.” What does it mean that all of this is like a dense forest? A forest is a living system, composed of countless interdependent components and aspects. It is empty in the sense that no permanent, graspable “forest” essence can be found within it, and yet it clearly exists, thrives, and perpetuates itself. Although the forest lacks an inherent, identifiable center and a self-consciousness, still it has characteristics and presence.
This whole strange and wondrous world, then, and we ourselves, are “standing within” the Buddha’s eyes. The footnotes say the Buddha’s “eyes” represent his awakening. Eyes allow us to perceive, and we often use the word “see” when we mean that we have perceived or understood something, even if it had nothing to do with visual perception. What does it mean that we stand within the Buddha’s enlightenment? Perhaps we can imagine this in dream space again. We might say:
The Buddha’s enlightenment was a palpable – kind of like light, or warm water or something. It surrounded us on all sides, no matter how limited our own understanding. There was no one and nothing outside of it. It was comforting and encouraging.
But Keizan doesn’t stop there. Not only are we standing within Gautama’s eyes, those eyes have been replaced by all of you here. He then takes away our metaphor of being surrounded by the glow of Shakyamuni’s enlightenment by reminding us that we are lumps of flesh and so are Gautama’s eyes. Ah! We are abruptly brought down from the ethereal realms to our own bodies. If he hadn’t been a lump of flesh, Shakyamuni would never have needed to awaken, would never have sought awakening, and would never have attained this thing to which we aspire. If we weren’t lumps of flesh, we couldn’t practice or realize anything. Indeed, although we imagine awakening to be something that takes place in a transcendent realm far from the messiness of our everyday lives, nothing could be further from the truth. When you awaken, you become Gautama, right within your human condition. You could continue your dream:
Then my body was the Buddha’s body. I can’t explain how that could be so, but it was. It wasn’t that I stole his body from him, like he no longer had a body, but he could scratch my nose and raise my eyebrows. I could raise his eyebrows, too. And it was the same for everyone else present. We still had bodies, but that did not require separateness.
What about the phrase, “each and every person’s entire body, one by one, is a cliff rising ten thousand fathoms?” The glossary says a “cliff rising ten thousand fathoms” is some aspect of ultimate reality like Buddha-Nature, “as unavoidable and awesome in its presence as a cliff that towers one thousand arm spans, or ‘fathoms, roughly 80,000 feet, in front of one.” However, a reality like Buddha-Nature can’t be grasped through discriminating thought, “just as a sheer cliff provides no handholds or footholds with which to climb it.”[iii] How about this for dream imagery?
In another dream I was searching for something I knew I had to find. I kept glimpsing people and things I recognized from afar, but when I got close to them, they became vast, smooth cliffs I couldn’t possibly climb or get around. Then I would go searching somewhere else. I had a sense that each of these cliffs I encountered was exactly the thing I was searching for, though, I just didn’t know how to relate to it.
Note that even though there is a sense in which our very bodies are Shakyamuni’s enlightenment, Keizan warns us not to think that we’re all therefore “exalted people with perfectly clear eyes.” In other words, all of this non-separation does not automatically make us Buddhas, or beings who have awakened to Reality. This makes Keizan’s next question to us quite poignant: “what will you call the principle that underlies attainment of the way?”
The Undying Person in this Hermitage
[Denkoroku Lead Chapter, Page 7 is read aloud in the podcast]
This passage uses a number of classic Buddhist and Chan summations of the phenomenon of a human being. In classical Buddhism, we are said to be compromised of four elements (earth, or flesh and bones; water, or blood and other fluids; fire, or the warmth of a living body, and wind, or breath) or, alternatively, of five skandhas, or aggregates (physical form, sensations, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness). Keizan borrows “skin, flesh, bones, and marrow” from a story about Bodhidharma using those terms to describe the depth of understanding each of his four disciples had attained; here Keizan manages to refer both to our physical bodies as well as to whatever level of spiritual insight we might have. Finally, in Chan the human person is often referred to as a small, lightly-constructed hut or hermitage, usually said to be made of grass – something which will not last long, within which we take refuge for a time. Yet another way to describe a person is as a “skin bag” – everything we arbitrarily identify as self because it happens to be held inside our skin. Keizan is clearly asking you to consider the question of your self in all the ways you can possibly do so.
We are asked, “Who is the undying person within the hermitage?” This question seems to stand in utter contradiction to Buddhist teachings. Undying person? Someone residing within our collection of five aggregates, or inside our grass hermitage? Is this saying we do have some kind of inherently existing, enduring self-nature? No. So what is it saying?
We recognize through practice that fundamentally our self-nature is not about our body, personality, opinions, relationships, possessions, mental abilities, etc… All of those things change. What is our true self-nature? Who are we? We know we are alive. We know we are. Here we are. If there was no one here, there would be no Buddhist practice. There would be no one to aspire to the way, no one to Realize it, no one to respond. And yet this “one” cannot be grasped. It has no inherent essence.
Does that mean, then, that we don’t exist? This question is based on assumptions we don’t even realize we’re making, until we become more familiar with ultimate truth. As Keizan points out, how could what we are looking for be apart from this skin bag? This flesh, here and now, this manifestation – which is not it, and yet it can’t be found anywhere else. Your life, my life, just as it is, manifests what Shakyamuni realized, perfectly. We can’t imagine that can be so, which is why we do not yet experience enlightenment – we are still bounded by the limits of our imagination.
Even when we come to know the undying person in the hut (when we can call out to ourselves, confidently), Keizan says you “should not understand the beings on earth as distinct from yourself.” How can we inhabit this skin bag fully, looking for nothing beyond, allowing the undying person to manifest and act, and also make no distinctions between self and all beings? Again, we only imagine this to be a problem or a contradiction.
Near the end of his chapter on Shakyamuni Buddha, Keizan tells us, “you should investigate horizontally and investigate vertically until, with seven penetrations and eight masteries, you clarify Gautama’s place of awakening and understand attainment of the way by your own self.” To investigate horizontally and vertically, according to the footnotes, means to consider from every possible angle. We like to imagine that Keizan’s monks easily understood what he said and the next step in their path toward penetration and mastery was always clear to them. We imagine it is only because we are separated from Keizan by time, space, and culture that we wonder what to do with the Dharma teachings he left us and wonder constantly whether we are on the best path of practice. However, I’m willing to bet that Keizan’s monks, on the whole, were every bit as confused as we are. Still, like us, some of them had the determination to keep on investigating, relentlessly, from every angle.
Endnotes
[i] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ultimate
[ii] Foulk, T. Griffith, Editor-in-Chief. Record of the Transmission of Illumination, Volume I: An Annotated Translation of Zen Master Keizan’s Denkoroku. Translated by T. Griffith Foulk with William M. Bodiford, Sarah J. Horton, Carl Bielefeldt, and John R. McCrae. Tokyo, Sotoshu Shumucho and Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2021.
[iii] Foulk, T. Griffith, Editor-in-Chief. Record of the Transmission of Illumination, Volume II: A Glossary of Terms, Sayings, and Names pertaining to Keizan’s Denkoroku. Translated by T. Griffith Foulk with William M. Bodiford, Sarah J. Horton, Carl Bielefeldt, and John R. McCrae. Tokyo, Sotoshu Shumucho and Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 2021.
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