It’s challenging to make our Dharma practice continuous – maintaining awareness and appropriate conduct each moment of our lives. In his essay Gyoji, or “Continuous Practice,” Zen Master Dogen doesn’t offer practical tips for mindfulness and pure conduct in everyday life, but instead challenges our limited ideas about what practice is. In this episode (part 2), I continue discussing four points I think Dogen makes about Gyoji.

Our goal in practice is to live in accord with the truth, or the Dharma - not only while sitting in meditation or studying Buddhism, but every moment of our lives. In other words, we strive to make our practice continuous. It can be extremely challenging to maintain mindfulness and good behavior all the time. How can we make our practice more continuous? Not surprisingly, in his essay “Gyoji,” or Continuous Practice, Dogen does not give us practical tips but instead challenges our limited ideas about what practice is.

In my second episode reflecting on Dogen's “Bussho,” or “The Buddha-Nature," I discuss how Buddha-Nature is a teaching about our existential koan as human beings. I also talk about how Dogen says we have already got Buddha-Nature, and then explore more fully his teaching about "Total Existence."

In his essay "Bussho," or "The Buddha-Nature," Dogen explores and expands a classic Mahayana Buddhist teaching. I reflect on a few central concepts from the first paragraph.

In this episode I explore a teaching from 12th-century Chan master Hongzhi, in which he instructs us to “wander into the center of the circle of wonder.” I propose that the whole of the Dharma can be found by exploring the nature of wonder, and what it is that obstructs wonder.

In Zen we say practice is nothing other than your everyday activity. As long as you view the Dharma as something special – a particular activity you view treat as more sacred, or a state you hope to attain that will be of an entirely different nature than the mundane existence you currently endure – you’re missing the point. At the same time, if we think practice is nothing other than just continuing our half-awake, habitual way of living, we’re also missing the point! What is the nature of our life and practice? Zen Master Dogen explores this koan in his essay “Kajo,” or “Everyday Activity.”

I continue in a second episode with my reflections on Chan master Hongzhi's "Guidepost of Silent Illumination. I discuss the interdependence of absolute and relative and why that matters in real life; how skillful bodhisattva action arises out of zazen; how silence is the supreme mode of communication, and how serenity and illumination - calm and insight - are both contained in zazen.

In this episode and the next, I’m going to riff off of 12th-century Chan master Hongzhi’s short text, “Guidepost of Silent Illumination,” one of the most positive and encouraging Zen teachings a know. By “riff” I mean I’ll play off of, and spontaneously elaborate on, Hongzhi’s words, as opposed to explaining or analyzing them in an exhaustive or comprehensive way. I take this approach because it’s more fun, but also because “Guidepost of Silent Illumination,” like most Chan and Zen writings, is essentially poetry.

In this episode I finish up our study of 13th-century Zen master Dogen’s essay, “Bodaisatta Shishobo,” or what I’m calling the “Four Ways Bodhisattvas Embrace Living Beings,” with a discussion of "identity action," or "being in the same boat" with living beings. Even if you’re not a big fan of Zen texts, or of Dogen, I hope you’ll stick around because this episode is on the importance of a bodhisattva – the importance of any of us – making a practice of seeing ourselves as “being in the same boat” with other beings. Can you imagine how different our societies would be if we all tried to do this?

In his essay "Zazen Yojinki," or "Points to Keep in Mind When Practicing Zazen," 13th-century Zen master Keizan Jokin presents “clarify[ing] the mind-ground and dwell[ing] comfortably in [your] original nature”[i] as our fundamental job as Buddhists if we’re seeking liberation. I explore the meaning of this phrase in this Dharma Talk, reflecting on a nondual experience beyond words, and why Zen and Mahayana so often use terms like "mind" or "actual nature" when pointing to it.