Posts tagged “Shohaku Okumura”
Interesting experiences the past few days:
I go out several times a day to play ball with the dog. It keeps him exercised and theoretically more calm and it’s one of the little rituals
that I attend to that form the container of my life. There have been several times in the past few days where I’ve engaged that ritual and found myself looking up at the clouds and watching a solitary bird gliding around on thermals just being a bird. That was not the interesting part, however. The interesting part is that there was no thought of “bird” or “clouds” or “thermals”, I just used those words because that’s what this format is about. The experience was just that, a pure experience. No concepts. No labels. I looked up and my eyes took in birdglidingontheramalscloudsasbackground as a total experience of eyes doing what eyes do while bird does what birds do and clouds do what clouds do. There was no sense of being separate from those things either. Shane was as much birdglidingontheramalscloudsasbackground as birdglidingontheramalscloudsasbackground was Shane in that moment.
The same thing has been happening on the cushion. When I look into the wall, the wall is looking into me. Sound familiar? “…when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” … Friedrich Nietzsche. Or the Zen picture of the donkey staring into the well and the well staring into the donkey? There are times when boundaries of self and other fall away and they seem to be falling away more commonly for me lately.
It occurred to me during one of these times to go back to Genjokoan and pick up stanza five which is where I left off many months ago because it just eluded me, but this time around it seemed pretty plain. Makes me think Genjokoan could be translated as “you better get your meditation on before you pick this shit up, kid”.
Anyway, stanza five is currently speaking to me as an expression of walking the world minus concepts. More practice may have me see it differently later, but at least it isn’t totally puzzling me anymore. Here it is as translated by Shohaku Okumura in the fabulous book Realizing Genjokoan.
When buddhas are truly buddhas they don’t need to perceive they are buddhas; however, they are enlightened buddhas and they continue actualizing Buddha. In seeing color and hearing sound with body and mind, although we perceive them intimately, [the perception] is not like reflections in a mirror or the moon in water. When one side is illuminated, the other is dark.
Chew on that shit. It’s made my brain hurt for months.
If there is anyone out there who studies Genjokoan, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this stanza as well in comments.
As for the picture, it came up in WordPress’s media gallery based on words I used in this post and frankly it was just too damn funny not to use. Go Nietzsche go!
May 8, 2012 | Categories: 5584 | Tags: Buddha, Buddhism, Shohaku Okumura, zen | 2 Comments »
And so finally back to Genjokoan. I got side tracked by many of life’s irons in the fire, but I never forget about my on going review of Realizing Genjokoan.
In this post, I’m looking at the first 3 lines as translated by Shohaku Okumura. They are dense and on first blush seem to be contradictory. In Okumura’s analysis, he breaks it down like this: The first sentence is from the perspective of Buddha’s original teachings. Sentence two is written from the Mahayana perspective of the Heart Sutra and non dual thought while the last sentence is written from Dogen’s personal teaching perspective. The bulk of the chapter goes into looking more deeply into these 3 points of view.
These are the first three sentences in the translation:
1) When all dharmas are the Buddha Dharma, there is delusion and realization, practice, life and death, buddhas and living beings
2) When the ten thousand dharmas are without [fixed] self, there is no delusion and no realization, no buddhas and no living beings, no birth and no death.
3) Since the Buddha Way by nature goes beyond [the dichotomy of] abundance and deficiency, there is arising and perishing, delusion and realization, living beings and buddhas.
My thoughts on these sentences are that they seem to be a blow to the head to shake me out of my constructed or as some would say conditioned reality. What at first seems dissonant…there are or there are not delusions? There are or there are not living beings? There is or there is not death?…when taken as a gestalt are actually summed up as a clear message. All of these things are simultaneously true and descriptive of reality. Nirvana is Samsara is Nirvana…but not in a fixed manner. Okumura explores existence as a river which exists as a myriad of conditions, and as we’ve been told, you can never step in the same river twice. Trying to deny this simultaneous reality will keep me stuck in it.
“From the perspective of prajna (wisdom), if we think there are fixed places or conditions called ‘samsara,’ ‘nirvana,’ ‘delusion,’ and ‘enlightenment,’ our practice becomes merely an attempt to escape from what we think is undesireable” p. 40.
As Thich Nhat Hanh would say…the rose is in the garbage and the garbage is in the rose.
August 3, 2011 | Categories: Book review | Tags: Buddhism, Dharma, Mahayana, nirvana, samsara, Shohaku Okumura, Thich Nhat Hanh, zen | 5 Comments »
During the past few months, I have slowly been digesting my first reading of Shohaku Okumura’s translation and comentary on Dogen’s Genjokoan called Realizing Genjokoan. Since Okumura refers often to his teacher Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, I also decided to digest his popular work Opening the Hand of Thought as well to help me better understand Okumura’s thought process. I also participated in a book study on Opening the Hand of Thought that came along about the same time I started reading the book.
I had the idea that I would like to review Realzing Genjokoan as a rolling review, processing the pieces of Genjokoan (there are 13 stanzas in this translation) as they were dealt with in the book chapters but I was concerned that if I did that before I read the whole book first I would miss the bigger picture.
As I have begun going back thru Realizing Genjokoan I see now that my approach, while seemingly thought out and rationalized in my head was my own version of being a “fish that would swim…only after investigating the entire ocean”. Studying Okumura’s translation and commentary and reading Uchiyama’s work have been fruitful and clarifying, but they have also been me trying to understand the ocean before diving in. Or, in my own words, I ain’t gonna understand the pig til I roll in the shit.
So Okumura starts off by looking translating the word Genjokoan. He does this thru looking at the precise choices Dogen used to craft his expression of the word. The kanji he picked were not everyday usage and were meant to transmit a message. I don’t know kanji so I have no intention of trying to represent them here. I will just put out the translation as best I can. Okumura’s translation choices are very detailed (particularly in the understanding of koan) so I will only be presenting the essentials.
Gen – to show up
Jo – to become together they present the idea of manifestation or “to appear and become”
Koan – “reality, emptiness, includes both unity and difference”
The rest of the chapter deals with how the balance and understanding of individuality and universality become a way of life in what we call Zen (soto style) today. It is error to focus on only one part. Both must be engaged, relative and absolute must be engaged, and in the engagement, find a robust way of living.
Okumura’s final translation for Genjokoan is “to answer the question from true reality through the practice of our everyday activity.”
So the hook for me in this is that the experience of myself as an intersection between the material world and the universal/non dual world has been something I have felt in my bones for a long time. It is what has driven me to be a spiritual seeker since I was a teenager. It has developed and matured in me over many years and it was only 4 years ago that I learned about Buddhism and found out that people have been writing about my feeling for a few thousand years…imagine my surprise!
April 10, 2011 | Categories: 5584 | Tags: Buddhism, Dōgen, Shohaku Okumura, zen | 3 Comments »
Over the years I have been a spiritual vagabond, I’ve had this unspoken feeling in me that as a human, I am the perfect intersection of spirit and matter. I don’t think I would have ever put that into those exact words until recently, but that is the gist of how I felt. Maybe ‘spirit’ would be more like whatever I could not see or understand. It didn’t matter what I didn’t know about it, it was very much present and not in some obtuse way, but like something in my cells or dna. I can feel it, I just don’t know how the equation works to unlock it…yet.
There has been something about Zen that seems to address this for me in an unspoken way. That’s probably why I was so drawn to Zen as opposed to anything else, because it got me at that non-verbal level in my bones.
In what I’ve studied up to now (in books, not zazen) this idea has mainly been hinted at like words swirling around a black hole in space. A thing only discovered by the effect it has on other things.
Ok, so I told ya that to tell ya this:
Recently my Zentor recommended a book to me…Realizing Genjokoan by Shohaku Okumura. It is a study of this pithy bit of Dogen’s work and I’m finding it quite awesome (and I’m only on page 38). 
It’s got the feel of one of those kinds of books you read many time and study…some of the pages are getting weak from the amount of highlight ink I’m putting on them.
The reason I’m mentioning it now as opposed to just doing a single review is because early on, he hit the nail on the head regarding my spirit/matter thing I talked about above. Okumura starts the book off by analyzing the kanji Dogen used to write the title, Genjokoan, with. Apparently Doggie Diddles made very particular choices in the characters he used and they were not the everyday choices, either.
Anyhoot, I normally find this kind of analysis quite boring as shit, but Okumura actually held my interest. He works the word koan down to a definition based on the particular kanji Dogen uses and this is where the quote comes in that this post is centered around.
…the word koan expresses the reality of our own lives; we are the intersection of equality (universality, unity, oneness of all beings) and inequality (difference, uniqueness, particularity, individuality). Reality, or emptiness, includes both unity and difference. –Shohaku Okumura
This struck me as significantly as when I read Thich Nhat Hanh’s interpretation of the Heart Sutra form/emptiness phrase as “wave is water, water is wave…” The two quotes really help me validate what feels like one of the squishier bits of the Buddhist teachings and that’s Dirty Dharma, baby.
I’m nowhere near done with this book. In fact, I’ve only scratched the surface, but I already have to recommend it. Put your paws on it if you can.
September 26, 2010 | Categories: 100 days of practice, Book review, Dirty Dharma | Tags: Buddhism, koan, Religion and Spirituality, Shohaku Okumura, Thich Nhat Hanh, zazen, zen | Leave A Comment »
