I'll begin with a short passage from Dōgen's Genjōkōan:
Firewood becomes ash. Ash cannot turn back into firewood again. However, we should not view ash as after and firewood as before. We should know that firewood dwells in the dharma position of firewood, and it has its own before and after. Although there is before and after, past and future are cut off. Ash stays at the position of ash, and it has its own before and after. As firewood never becomes firewood again after it is burned and becomes ash, after a person dies, there is no return to living. However, in Buddha Dharma, it is a never-changing tradition not to say that life becomes death. Therefore, we call it no birth. It is the laid-down way of Buddha's turning the Dharma wheel not to say that death becomes life. Therefore, we call it no death. Life is a position at one time. Death is also a position at one time. For instance, this is like winter and spring. We don't think that winter becomes spring, and we don't say that spring becomes summer.
So Dōgen starts off stating our usual way of thinking about things — that firewood becomes ash. But then he examines this from a perspective of impermanence, and ends up deconstructing our ordinary sense of what a thing is, what change is, what time is. If each so-called thing has no unchanging essence, we cannot say that it goes through a sequence of time or transformations. There's no ongoing thing to say is changing or developing or progressing. Each thing is just each moment of what it is in that moment. When firewood is firewood, that's all it is. It's not a step towards ash. It has its complete existence as firewood. And ash isn't a transformation of firewood. Ash is ash. It has a complete existence, a before and after, just as ash.
And then he extends that to birth and death, saying if there is no permanent self, we can't say that something has come into existence. And if there's no ongoing thing, we can't say that it has at one point ended and call that death. Its beginning and its end are happening all the time, moment after moment.
This kind of focus on impermanence not only disrupts our sense of time, our sense of becoming — for Dōgen, it dissolves the boundaries between one thing and everything else. Again, if things have no fixed inner essence, how do you describe the difference or the boundary between one thing and another?
In another passage, Dōgen asks us to carefully examine the phenomenon of mountains walking. He says we're all familiar with human beings walking, but we ought to understand mountains walking as well. What does that mean? Well, at a very literal kind of level, you could say that for there to be walking, you have to be walking on the ground. The ground that you walk on, the earth that makes up the mountains, is just as necessary a part of walking as are your legs. There can be no walking without walking on ground. Walking is an activity that both you and the ground partake of, or co-create, moment after moment.
But we wouldn't really have to restrict it to the mountains as the ground on which we walk. He could equally have said the trees are walking. Because, again, our walking can only take place — only makes sense — in terms of walking in a world. Nothing is taking place in a vacuum, in isolation. The world in which we walk is a world of ground and sky and water, trees, sunshine. Our walking is something that happens only in this boundless context in which everything requires and determines and defines everything else. None of these things exist separately or independently. Everything implies every other thing.
Heidegger has an analogous idea — and I realize I'm probably in trouble if I think I'm going to make anything simpler by making reference to Heidegger — but he talks about the fourfold disclosure of everything, and he gives the example of a water jug. He says there are four dimensions to this water jug: the human, the divine, the earth, and the sky.
The human is the way that, when we see this jug, we immediately recognize it for what it is. We see it as a vessel, a container. We see that it has a handle that we can grasp. We see that it is a size and shape and weight that's graspable by us. We understand it as a usable artifact. It's not an inert thing. It's immediately perceived as something that we can make use of as part of our life.
The divine, we might translate as the realm of meaning. The jug is not simply a physical object that can contain wine or water or milk. It has a place in a whole form of life. And that place, that sense of its place, is not simply its utility, but all the ways it signifies — signifies the life of which it's a part. Is it something very rough and simple that goes along with the life of a peasant? Is it something for everyday use? Or is it something that's kept up on a shelf for display and taken down only on special occasions? Does it signify our daily meal, or is it used in a holiday ritual? Does it signify poverty or wealth or something in between? The jug, when it sits in its position, immediately discloses this whole world, this whole form of life around it. It's not simply an isolated object; we immediately recognize it as part of a whole array of things like plates and knives and glasses. The jug itself is part of and signifies a whole world — the same way walking and mountains do.
And he goes on to say it also has a dimension that he calls earth, because the jug, if it's made of clay, for instance, conveys something about the whole material world and its possibilities. Clay can be something rough and very simply crafted, but clay can also be turned into the finest, most delicate Wedgwood porcelain. Or it can be made into a precious Japanese teacup for the tea ceremony. Just the materiality of clay contains within it all these possibilities of what else it could be. It's one manifestation, but it sends out echoes of all its possible manifestations and uses and forms in the world.
And the final dimension, sky, implies the whole universe of existence and forces that make such a thing as clay and a jug and its fashioning possible. Its materiality, its elemental properties, the fact that it has weight — the fact that there is gravity that gives things weight. This is the whole background of the forces that go together to make the world what it is. The whole history and geology of clay that makes it something that's formed in a way that we can mine it and use it.
So again, what I hear in this kind of fourfold disclosure in Heidegger feels to me like an analogy to what Dōgen is trying to say in terms of the walking of mountains. Everything interpenetrates. Nothing has a clear boundary. Everything implies the whole world in which it's found.
So we've got these two very different kinds of dimensions to each thing. On one hand, everything is completely unique in itself. Firewood is just firewood. The ash is just ash. Everything just has this unique momentary existence as itself. And at the same time, everything implies every other thing. Nothing has a separate, unique existence. Everything comes at us whole.
Now, all this may seem to be very abstract and metaphysical, but I think Dōgen, as was Heidegger, is trying to free us from a kind of false narrative of continuity — a false narrative of a certain kind of story of progress. I think that we take these narratives so for granted that it's very hard to even imagine thinking about our lives in any other terms except: How are we doing? Where are we getting to? Where have we come from? How did we get here? Is it going well? Is it going badly? We take all these different moments in our life, and we not only string them together, we string them together in a way that we think gives them meaning. But that meaning can be very arbitrary in ways that we are oblivious to, so that we forget that the way we've put those moments together is something of our own creation. It's not intrinsic in the moments themselves.
Some of you may have seen a little video not long ago of Mel Weitsman, the teacher at the Berkeley Zen Center, who just passed away. I believe he was about ninety or ninety-one years old. In the last months of his life, they made a video of him giving beginner's instruction. And it was very charming to see him teach zazen and demonstrate how to sit, and he showed all the different postures, including how to sit in full lotus. It's quite remarkable to see this ninety-year-old man sitting in full lotus, and it's very nice to make a narrative about how a lifetime of practice develops into that ease and capacity, that physical strength and resilience and flexibility that makes all that possible. I think it's a wonderful story. I wish it was mine, but it's not.
Maybe thirty or thirty-five years ago, I could sit most of the time in half lotus. I was never able to sit any length of time in full lotus. But in those years when I could sit most of the sesshin in half lotus, I imagined that the more I did this, the more flexible I would become, and I would be able to do this well into my old age, and it would keep me flexible and limber to be practicing like this. Well, just the opposite happened. My knees got stiffer. My ankles and toes have become arthritic. Now it's not really possible for me to sit cross-legged at all. And the pain in my feet has, in this last year, made it harder to even sit kneeling in seiza. And now I sit most of the time in a chair.
What kind of narrative is that? Has this practice failed me? Did it work for Mel and not work for me? I think that my practice now has to be fully occupying the position of sitting in a chair. It's not that sitting in a chair is a failure to sit in half lotus. Sitting in a chair is sitting in a chair, the same way that being seventy-one is not a failure to have remained thirty-five or forty. Now I find myself seventy-one, sitting in a chair. Can I fully occupy that position?
That's what Dōgen is asking us. When we find ourselves in the position of ash, can we be fully ash? Or are we going to always try to remember what it was like to be firewood in the good old days?
How many of these kinds of narratives do you impose upon yourself? How much do you compare the age you are now with the age you once were? How much do you scare yourself with the age that you're going to be someday in the future? How much do you create a narrative of progress or failure? Do I have the job I dreamed of twenty years ago? Do I have the partner? Do I have the health, or looks, or wealth? Do I have the children, or family, that I think I'm supposed to have by now? We can have a wonderful list of those, and they can be like Mel's being able to sit in full lotus at ninety. It'd be great to be able to do that. But what if you can't? Is your life a failure? How do you fully occupy the position you actually find yourself in — without endless comparison, without judgment, without a whole story about why it's this way instead of some other way?
Dōgen and Heidegger are using this very abstract way of talking, but each in their own way, they're asking us simply to come back to life manifesting just as it is, right here and now, and to allow ourselves to fully be that. The narratives are always possible; they'll always be there. In some aspects of our daily life, we need the narratives. But zazen is designed to give us an alternative to that — that there's a whole dimension to our life that is not defined by those kinds of linear narratives, not defined by comparison and judgments. When we talk about just sitting, we really mean stepping off that linear narrative train into the moment of just this.
Can you do that today?