Poems of Dogen

[sky]

Originally Posted by Dogensoto

Just to add.......thank you Sky for your post 4 on this thread. I actually logged on back then to simply say that my joining this forum again had been a mistake and I was leaving. But that your post was made has kept me here.

Your very welcome it's nice chatting to you as It was when you were the 'shoe maker' I'm enjoying the poetry.
Btw, The state of 'no mistakes' is often called 'nowness' in Zen.

[Dogensoto]

Originally Posted by sky

Your very welcome it's nice chatting to you as It was when you were the 'shoe maker' I'm enjoying the poetry.
Btw, The state of 'no mistakes' is often called 'nowness' in Zen.

Ah, my days as the Cobbler's Apprentice..... if only I had completed my apprenticeship instead of dropping out!

One well know phrase of Dogen was that a zen master's life was "one mistake after another"!

In the heart of the night,
Moonlight framing
A small boat drifting,
Tossed not by the waves
Nor swayed by the breeze

The meaning of this, at least for Dogen, can be illuminated by his words found in his "Genjokoan" (the actualisation of reality) He writes:-

If one riding in a boat watches the coast, one mistakenly perceives the coast as moving. If one watches the boat in relation to the surface of the water, then one notices that the boat is moving. Similarly, when we perceive the body and mind in a confused way and grasp all things with a discriminating mind, we mistakenly think that the self-nature of the mind is permanent. When we intimately practice and return right here, it is clear that all things have no fixed self.

Maybe it is just me projecting my own emotions, but as I see it Dogen in his poem gives voice to the vulnerability of enlightenment, which we can never "possess" as such. It possesses us. It can never be "ours".

"A clearly enlightened person falls into the well. How is this so?" (A zen koan)

And Thomas Merton:-

We stumble and fall constantly, even when we are most enlightened.

As I see it, many fear vulnerability. We can cling to being right, of having "all truth" - but Faith is of another order. It is a letting go, a becoming.

Which is the "eastern" way of seeing things. Becoming, not Being. The eastern preoccupation with impermanence is well known to anyone who approaches its poetry, and impermanence can - and does - bring suffering when we cannot trust in the river of change. (Getting back to Dogen, he writes in one of his essays/sermons that "there is no path that comes from anything other than sincere trust; there is no direction that emerges from itself." )

But impermanence, if we "let go", can transform the suffering.

William Blake has written:-

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise

Therefore Being IS becoming. When things congeal in concepts "God" becomes an idol. Faith for me is in letting go.

I keep seeing Dogen sitting in Zazen, ramrod straight - in a strange sense inspirational. Someone who truly cared about Reality, who has left behind his words and poems that seek not to impose Dogen's own path, time and place upon us, but that - rather - allow us to find ours.

[sky]

Originally Posted by Dogensoto

Ah, my days as the Cobbler's Apprentice..... if only I had completed my apprenticeship instead of dropping out!

The time wasn't right

[Dogensoto]

Originally Posted by sky

The time wasn't right

Ah ha! That's what I like - understanding rather than judgement!

[Dogensoto]

Reading biographical bits and pieces helps me put "flesh" onto words and concepts. A question that haunted Dogen (maybe his own "life koan") was, if the Mahayana teaching of Original Enlightenment was true, why did the Buddhas of old practice so assiduously? Why did they practice at all?

(Apparently the Buddha was asked once why he continued to meditate even after enlightenment and he answered:- "Out of compassion for the world". Which to me holds "answers" far better than lengthy discourses on Time and its vagaries!)

Anyway, we all have our own life koan, and have to find our own answers.

Here is Dogen on - perhaps - "Original Face" and "Original Enlightenment"...


In spring, the cherry blossoms,
In summer, the cuckoo’s song,
In autumn, the moon, shining,
In winter, the frozen snow:
How pure and clear are the seasons!

Then...

Seeking the Way
Amid the deepest mountain paths,
The retreat I find
None other than
My primordial home

Another story I like about Dogen was when he first arrived in China, seeking answers to his life koan. He met an old cook from a nearby monastery, who was gathering together the ingredients for his next monastic meal. Dogen said to him, "Wouldn't you rather be studying and practicing the Dharma than cooking for the novices?" The cook laughed. Then Dogen felt shame.

Apparently the old cook was the one who said to Dogen that in all of the universe "nothing is concealed". I've always loved those words. So egalitarian. Yet as the commentator Hee-Jin Kim says, "Nevertheless, the mystery of emptiness and thusness had to go beyond this: intimacy had to be ever penetrated."

[sky]

Will their gaze fall upon

The petals of words I utter,

Shaken loose and blown free by the spring breeze

As if only the notes

Of a flower’s song....

Dōgen uses a waka to convey mixed feelings about composing poetry and about the way his expressions are received by the audience."

[Joe Mc]

Crimson leaves

Whitened by the season's first snow—

Is there anyone

Who would not be moved

To celebrate this in song?

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