We’ll continue with our discussion of the Sandokai, and I’ll begin by reading a few lines from our White Plum translation with which you’re familiar, and then I’ll read the Suzuki Roshi translation, and we can begin to contrast them.
Light and darkness are a pair,
like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.
Each thing has its own intrinsic value and is
related to everything else in function and position.
Ordinary life fits the absolute like a box and its lid.
The absolute works together with the relative
like two arrows meeting in midair.
Light and dark oppose one another
like front and back foot in walking.
Each of the myriad things has its merit,
expressed according to function and place.
Phenomena exist, like box and lid joining;
principles accords, like arrow points meeting.
They certainly have a different flavor, the Suzuki sounding a little more abstract as I read it now. But in his discussion, it’s interesting that in our version, we say Light and darkness are a pair, like the foot before and foot behind in walking. And his version is that Light and darkness oppose one another, so it’s interesting to have contrast between a pair that is working in tandem with opposites that are in a certain kind of dialectical balance. He begins talking about absolute and relative as an example of opposition, and his example begins with a Japanese folktale figure, the Peach Boy, I think, who seems soft and gentle and weak but has, I gather, secret strength and superpowers, and he wants to say that these two things in Japanese culture go together, that strength and gentleness or compassion need to be a complementary pair, even though we say that one opposes the other. Perhaps the better word would be that they complement each other.
I think the psychological issue that he points to is that so often we want to stay in one half of that dichotomy or the other, particularly strength versus weakness. We want to find a position of strength or security or stability and hold on to it, not lose it, not think that dependency or vulnerability or weakness is a necessary complement to our strength. One of his examples is student and teacher, how in a way it’s very easy to get stuck in one side of that or the other. Certainly it’s easy for teachers to get stuck in the position: I have all the answers. I’ve got it, you don't. They can get very attached to that position of authority. And the student equally can be very attached to holding on to an idealization or imagining: Oh – the teacher has all the answers. They’ll show me the way. They’ll take care of me. They'll have all the responsibility. So there can be something equally attractive or at least equally sticky about the position of dependency.
And of course we hear a lot these days about the binary of masculine and feminine, and how all too often what is considered masculine is an expulsion of anything feminine, of anything weak, of anything dependent, and the feminine as intrinsically passive or dependent or the object rather than the subject of desire and agency.
So we’re trying to find a way for these to be complementary and not in opposition or exclusive of one another. Now, Suzuki is a lot of back and forth around independence and dependence or dependency and interdependency, something where dependency is shared and mutual. It’s not simply one half of a binary equation.
Now, Suzuki uses the somewhat unappealing metaphor of digestion for the resolution of this binary. He says that when we put food on our plate, each thing is very distinct. You know, there’s the rice, and the vegetable, and god-forbid there might be some meat, there’s the bread. Each thing is distinctive and you can tell one thing from another, but when we eat it we chew it all up and it becomes this amorphous glob that then goes down into our stomach and is digested and no longer is there any distinction between one thing and another. The distinctions are lost in a kind of digestive oneness.
There’s a lot of language about difference being reabsorbed into oneness or disappearing into oneness, and it’s not often clear what we should make of that, and whether that’s a kind of transcendence that we’re supposed to aspire to, where all distinctions are eliminated. I think it’s a case where it might be interesting to contrast this with Hegel’s expression of the I in the We and the We in the I. It's a different kind of formulation of interdependency and intersubjectivity. We’re used to thinking about the I and the We, that I as a separate individual join together with other individuals and then collectively we make up a We, and the We exists as the collection of all those individuals.
But Suzuki then turns it around and speaks of the We in the I. We’re less apt to think about that, because it basically says, I can’t be myself by myself. I don’t start out separate and individual and then join with other individuals. In fact, who I am is from the very beginning a function of my relations with others, that I only know myself by interacting with others, by getting the recognition of others. It’s only by iterating and bumping into and responding and getting responded to, that I develop any sense of my individuality, and I know who I am.
The baby researchers talk about intersubjectivity that way, when they say the baby learns I am the one that makes mommy smile. Mommy is the one that makes me smile. We learn these things together, who I am, who mommy is, through interaction, through having an impact on one another. So I think we are always groping for metaphors for this kind of mutual complementarity, of interaction that is mutually enabling. Walking is a really useful metaphor for that, because we don’t really think that the left foot and the right foot oppose each other. They take turns being front and back, but they really only work in tandem. It’s not like we have one leg and then found out that evolving a second leg would be twice as good, because then it’s like, if you have just one leg, you’re getting around like on a pogo stick, and the idea is not that you get two pogo sticks, but when you have two legs, a whole other kind of motion becomes possible. It’s not just twice what you had with a single leg. It’s something completely and fundamentally different, and I think that that is what we’re trying to think about, strangely, in terms of absolute and relative, that there’s a kind of interaction, back and forth, that isn’t just a multiple or alternative of one position or the other, but that there’s something very special in the way these two function together.
The next couple of lines are often considered very obscure or mysterious, but I really like them as a description of how we come to practice and encounter it. That is the image of Ordinary life fits the absolute like a box and its lid.The absolute works together with the relative like two arrows meeting in midair. I think in a sense they could almost be described as the contrast between Soto and Rinzai practice, or between doing shikantaza and working on Mu. If you ever worked on the koan Mu, you know that trying to answer it can feel like doing something extraordinary and almost impossible, like trying to make two arrows meet in midair. No matter what you do, it seems to elude you. How am I ever going to make this happen?
So that is the Zen of extraordinary effort and special attainment, and realization is something that only happens at the end of long, intense practice and as the reward of only a special few who are willing to totally throw themselves into this practice. If you read Mumon’s comment on Mu, you get that sense of the extraordinary effort involved, what an extraordinary thing it would be to finally make this happen, like two arrows meeting in midair. But then we balance that with these other lines: Ordinary life fits the absolute like a box and its lid. There, instead of being something impossible to attain, the image is: You can’t miss. It’s not two arrows trying to hit each other. It’s: Everything is the target. You can’t possibly miss it. Wherever it lands, that’s it. And this, in a sense, is the spirit of shikantaza, where Dogen speaks about the identity of practice and realization, where we’re not sitting zazen in order to become enlightened, and we have to sit for a long time and do it just right, in order to get that result somewhere down the line if we’re lucky.
The vision which is really a kind of mystical vision, is that sitting and realization are the same thing, that sitting is the expression, the manifestation, of a realization that is already present in us. And if realization carries too much of a connotation of an answer that you’ve got, you can say that sitting moment after moment simply manifests the dharma, simply manifests the reality of impermanence and interdependency, and what we’re doing, moment after moment, is resting in the middle of that, or enacting that, or expressing what we already are, because we are already impermanent, we’re already interdependent. These are states that we have to attain, they are realities that we simply have to recognize.
Now, in a sense, each of those perspectives has its virtues and has its pitfalls. The sight of two arrows meeting in mid-air can represent great effort, but it can also lead you to a particular sort of elitism or a sense of endless striving where the answer is always on the horizon and you’re never going to get to it. The identity of practice and realization, if you don’t take it seriously, can just become a kind of commonplace, something you give lip service to but don’t really believe and don’t really take seriously. In Joko’s line of practice, you could say that what we attend to moment after moment is our resistance or our denial of that. We don’t think this is it. Not this moment. Maybe some other better moment, but not this one. Not the one where my mind is preoccupied or my knee hurts or my back hurts. That doesn’t seem like the identity of practice and realization. So really settling into that, or having faith that that’s a reality, is a whole other mode of practice.
Suzuki’s commentary here, his gloss on that, is that it teaches us the value of suffering, not as a necessary step in our discipline practice. It’s not a kind of no pain, no gain, if you don’t work hard, if you don’t suffer, you’ll never get there, although we certainly get versions of that message all the time. It’s rather that suffering is also the manifestation of just this, of this moment, as it’s part of that box and the lid. It’s: This moment is it, even the moment of suffering. That, I think, is really how we mature in this practice. The way I‘ve put it in the past is to say that we hope when we start practice that it will make suffering disappear from our life, but the effect of practice over the years is to make practice disappear into our life, to make it indistinguishable from life itself, and strangely from the perfection of life itself.