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Dōgen on Hearing Things As They Are…a Response to Okumura Roshi

Dōgen on Hearing Things As They Are…a Response to Okumura Roshi

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One of my most beloved contemporary Zen practitioners and scholars is Shōhaku Okumura Roshi. One reason is simply the fact that he is in the lineage of Zen that I attempt to practice, namely Dōgen’s. But I also find his approach very human; that is, his approach to Zen is a Zen that a human could practice. This is not always the case, it seems to me, with other Zen practitioners and commentators. But this, of course, does not mean I…

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The Desirability of Desire

The Desirability of Desire

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A fairly standard, but I would argue flawed, understanding of Buddhism says that the root cause of suffering is desire—and a related interpretation says even that desire itself is suffering. While those are overly simplistic and problematic interpretations in themselves, some interpreters of Buddhism go even further and say that enlightenment requires the cessation of all desire. If we take that literally as a call for having no desires whatsoever, then it is difficult to take that seriously. After all,…

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Controlling for Joy

Controlling for Joy

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I often have the feeling that my Buddhist practice is in turmoil. Its high and low tides in response to my sorrow’s moon. Sometimes that moon is full, others new, but most often all manner of shapes in-between. This would likely bother me more if I had not read CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters when I was first working through my existential crisis of religion in my early 20s. This short book is a fascinating read, as Lewis relates an…

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Pain vs. Pleasure: An Incongruity of Sympathies

Pain vs. Pleasure: An Incongruity of Sympathies

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If you are reading this, then I am guessing that you are not suffering too badly, nor are you having the time of your life—although I guess it would be rather flattering if either of those things were happening and you were that determined to read this. But assuming you’re not, let me ask you to imagine, to really try to imagine, that there are people in other parts of the world right now who are suffering greatly. There are…

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Walt Whitman and Crossing the Boundaries of Consciousness

Walt Whitman and Crossing the Boundaries of Consciousness

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My dear reader, forgive me for what is most likely a projection. I am loath to admit it but often when poetry begins some prose piece that I am to read, I do little more than skim it. I have never even read through all of the poems that begin Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. Please do not gasp too loudly—I know I’m a terrible human being. So, please do not be like me. Please read these selections (and ideally the…

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Dirty Ontology: The Muddy Waters of “the” Self

Dirty Ontology: The Muddy Waters of “the” Self

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“When the water is deep, the boat rides high. When there is much mud, the Buddha is large.” —Dōgen, “The Indestructible Nature in Deep Muddy Water” in the Eihei Kōroku   “Know thyself” is the fairly famous injunction inscribed overhead at Apollo’s temple at Delphi. The meaning of this may be less obvious than it seems, but regardless of how it was intended, we can read it in different ways depending on what we understand by “knowing” and what we…

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Midlife Crisis: Or First Draft of a Book Preface

Midlife Crisis: Or First Draft of a Book Preface

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It seems to me that my life, like surely many people’s lives, resembles the trajectory of modernism to postmodernism (to post-postmodernism?). That is, like many people, when I was a child everything was imbued with a robust intrinsic identity and meaning, both of which could be definitively and determinedly known. One of the most obvious examples of this was the faith in the near omniscience of my parents, and once in school and out of the house, in that of…

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Epicurus, Dōgen, and Not Fearing Death

Epicurus, Dōgen, and Not Fearing Death

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Accustom thyself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply sentience, and death is the privation of sentience,… Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer. (Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus,…

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Single-pointed Activity: When eating eat; when walking walk.

Single-pointed Activity: When eating eat; when walking walk.

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Satori (enlightenment?) on the cushion in all of its ineffability is said to be single-pointed; a dissolution of the self and all selves. But such dissolution could not be the way of lived enlightenment practice off the cushion. For otherwise in your attempt to be compassionate activity in the world, you would be no better off than the perverse skeptic who refuses to avoid the pitfall because he’s convinced his senses cannot be trusted. Nevertheless, off the cushion, there is…

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