Poems of Dogen
 

For a while I have taken a great interest in the 13th century zen master Dogen. A fascinating character. One simple thing that I admire is his obvious intensity, how he took every moment of time seriously. The "matter of life and death" was his deep concern There seems so much superficiality today, so much useless and senseless noise - the call to love the world while not conforming to it can create confusion of mind and heart.

But anyway, a poem of Dogen:-

To what shall I
Liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops,
Shaken from a crane's bill.

Many commentators, led astray by "the languid east" nonsense, and thoughts of maya (understood as "illusion") see such words, understand the poem, as being some some sort of diminution of the individual, and our world as being in a sense unreal.

Sir Edwin Arnold wrote, in his epic poem of the Buddha's life, "The Light of Asia", ended that poem with the words (upon the death of the Buddha as he enters Nirvana):-

"The dewdrop slips into the shining sea". More misunderstanding.

In fact, it is more that the shining sea slips into the dewdrop - yet even that does not capture the Buddhist position, which in fact is a no-position that supecedes all positions.

Getting back to Dogen's poem, here is a more perceptive understanding:-

“According to this verse, the entire world is fully contained in each and every one of the innumerable dewdrops, each one symbolic of the inexhaustible contents of all impermanent moments. Here the dewdrops no longer suggest illusion in contrast to reality because they are liberated by their reflection of the moon’s glow. Conversely, the moon as a symbol of Buddha-nature is not an aloof realm since it is fully merged in the finite and individuated manifestations of the dew. Just as the moon is one with the dewdrops, the poem itself becomes one with the setting it depicts.” (Steven Heine)

Thus the particular is seen to contain the universal. Each and every particular. Every moment. Every NOW. In this world, not some imagined "other" promised beyond the grave.

Another astute commentator Hee-Jin Kim invites us to pay particular attention to the pivotal word “shaken.” He explains:- "Many examples could be given of static images of the moon in a dewdrop or the moon reflected in still water but, by virtue of being shaken, the metaphor becomes dynamic and interactive."

So much for illusion, the diminution of the individual!

The Way does not exist to be found. Each moment is the way - and Dogen presents a very profound way of actualising this. Time is Being, Being is time. Time does not just "fly away", it is eternally present. Every moment is the "time being".

"Sir Edwin Arnold wrote, in his epic poem of the Buddha's life, "The Light of Asia", ended that poem with the words (upon the death of the Buddha as he enters Nirvana):-"

According to Buddhist Scriptures you don't 'enter' Nirvana, you attain it. There are two states of Nirvana, Nirvana with remainder (attained whilst alive) and Parinirvana (Attained at death)....

Thanks for the Poem, it's lovely....

More to follow....

Regarding the Poem.

In Mahayana Buddhism the moon stands for Buddha nature. So the poem teaches that the moon (Buddha nature) is reflected in every one of the countless dew drops which represent (all things).
Another way of looking at it....

Yes, it is common in Japanese poetry that the moon is an image of Buddhist enlightenment. Many ways of looking at it!

Another poem of Dogen:-

Attaining the heart
Of the sutra,
The sounds of the
Bustling marketplace
Preach the Dharma

This is as it should be. Our mind/hearts should open to the world, "hear" the Dharma in each and every moment. In my own Pure Land path of "no-calculation" the "marketplace" is the dojo (training ground), and everyone you meet is a potential "master". If not so, we can end up merely meeting ourselves, time and time again, seeing and hearing reflections and echoes.

I tend to look for correspondences, and moving back "west" there is James Joyce who writes in "Ulysses":-

"God is a shout in the street"

Insights of others are always my mentors, as I am often blind to so much. These from one or two commentaries on the works of James Joyce:-

Bloom (Leopold Bloom of Ulysses) is no perfect hero, but perfection is overrated. Give me a honest human being embracing their mundane humanity any day over a person striving after perfection.

Joyce does not present us with the illusion of a perfect life in this book, a life without pain and sorrow, but in all his honesty Joyce shows us that life as it is and not as we think it should be is worth saying Yes to. The sorrows and difficulties faced in Ulysses are included in Joyce’s affirmation of life, because what good would such an affirmation be if it did not include all of life?

Joyce offers a new litmus test for what we call the hero, not gigantic feats of strength, but small and simple feats of kindness.

And finally:-

An epiphany was not a miraculous dispensation from above but, as Joyce defined it, an insight into 'the soul of the commonest object'

(Kevin Birmingham, from "The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle For James Joyce's Ulysses.")

Simple feats and acts of kindness. So easy to miss, to become deaf and blind to. I think that we can miss so much simply because of expectations of something extraordinary taught in some esoteric text.

Thank you for sharing. It seems as if all precious fixation, and preciousness and fixation are cast aside, naturally in the movement of the crane's bill.
Of course it is still a miracle that the moon appears inside the dewdrop, something the human mind likes to become interested in.

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Thanks. Yes, everything should be ever new, everything a miracle.

There is another poem by Dogen that speaks of finding your true self beyond all the longing and wishing, beyond all fixations.

Just when my longing to see
The moon over Kyoto
One last time grows deepest,
The image I behold this autumn night
Leaves me sleepless for its beauty.

Dogen was on his very last journey and held that yearning for an old fixation in his mind/heart, then the beauty of the present moment was gifted to him.
It is always a gift.

Woww Amazing poem, thanks for sharing. Dogen being the founding Father of Soto Zen, higlighted the Soto Zen sitting meditation which they call Zazen.
Hope it is fair to say that Dogen emphasised that Zazen was 'IT'. You didn't sit to become anything, you just sat, and like the moon your true nature appeared naturally.
Hope you don't mind me saying that, I know your thread is about Dogen's poems but It is so wonderful, simple and tres difficile I thought I'd remind myself. :smile:

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Hello again, yes, according to one of Dogen's commentators, Hee-Jin Kim, Dogen saw Zazen as a " mythic-cultic archetype". Not so much the "only way" as more a symbol that all moments are IT.

But Dogen is so difficult to pin down. But you are right, I think, in saying that it is not a way of becoming anything, but the Way itself. As each moment should be. Me, I just stumble on.

Just to add, Dogen's own teacher in China taught the power of the present moment, even as the only moment, yet this did not mean that there is no future result from practice.

For each moment the ultimate is immanent in things insofar as they demonstrate or reflect ultimate truth, but such truth is the truth of impermanence (Hee-Jin Kim)

Hee-Jin Kim adds that there is eternal truth and any ephemeral circumstance can demonstrate it to us, but we cannot grasp it as a concept. It can grasp us, but we can never grasp it in any final way.

It all makes me feel a bit dizzy. Sometimes I think that we must have a good sense of humour, especially to be able to genuinely laugh at ourselves.

Coming, going, the waterbirds
don't leave a trace
don't follow a path

Love it, short and sweet yet so deep....

Hopefully I can post this here without interrupting the theme of the thread. If not, I can post it in the 'Zen Anybody' thread.
Well I 'stumbled' on this one, to borrow Dogensoto's phrase, this morning. It is a stunning teaching and it is so strikingly beautiful.
/\ So profound. Hope you listen.

Nothing Special (ZEN: Right Practice) by Shunryu Suzuki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRjIo_baQAk&t=306s

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Yes, invokes the heart of Dogen's essay/sermon "Uji" or Being/Time. Being is time, time is Being. Time does not just fly by!

In spring wind
peach blossoms
begin to come apart.
Doubts do not grow
branches and leaves.

Dogen

Yes there's different ways of looking at it... To me it's referring to freedom from a fixed mind with all it's attachments....

That is the beauty of Reality.

Another Dogen poem written, according to Steven Heine, as expositions of Mahayana teaching.

Petals of the peach blossom
Unfolding in the spring breeze,
Sweeping aside all doubts
Amid the distractions of
Leaves and branches.


Stephen Heine adds a footnote that draws attention to a story of a zen master gaining enlightenment through observing the spring peach blossoms in bloom. Dogen, reading about this, writes that he himself gained enlightenment upon seeing them fall. Various ways of "seeing"

Dogen also wrote that "weeds grow even though we dislike them, flowers fall even though we love them". Grace can transform weeds or flowers, falling or growing. I think our minds so often try to create a "perfect" state of being in which we can find rest.

Thomas Merton:-

The spiritual life is something that people worry about when they are so busy with something else they think they ought to be spiritual. Spiritual life is guilt. Up here in the woods is seen the New Testament: that is to say, the wind comes through the trees and you breathe it.

(from "Day of a Stranger")

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.

As I may have mentioned, I do have some mental health issues. Nothing really serious but various moods can descend from nowhere.

Anyway, thanks. Some nice poems being posted.

Glad you are here Dogensoto and created this thread, I find it very inspiring.

I won’t even stop
at the valley’s brook
for fear that
my shadow
may flow into the world.

– Dogen

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Your very welcome :smile: it's nice chatting to you as It was when you were the 'shoe maker' :biggrin: 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.

The time wasn't right :smile:

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

:smile:

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."

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."

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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