Over the next month or two we’ll be discussing Dan Leighton’s book, Just This Is It, the teaching of Dongshan. I’m going to speak today a little bit about him and we will proceed through the koans that feature him and culminate in his long poem, The Jewel Mirror of Samadhi, which carried forward many of the themes that we’ve discussed in the Identity of Relative and Absolute, but with an added layer of complexity and obscurity, for those who found the Sandokai too simple.
Dongshan, or Tozan, his Japanese name, was considered one of the founding teachers of the Soto lineage. The “To” of Tozan is taken out of a part of the name Soto. He lived, I believe, in the 9th Century, and therefore hundreds of years before the stories about him were compiled into the great koan collections, or a volume of his own sayings. So as Leighton points out, there are no contemporary records of his teaching, and no way to historically verify anything that he said, which doesn’t make him too different from many of our ancestors.
I think the important thing to keep in mind is when we hear a story about him, or read one of these koans, the point is not to ask, Is this true? as in, Did this historically really happen? But rather, why, hundreds of years later, would people write down the story in this particular form? What was the teaching they were trying to convey? What made it an important story for them? Dongshan is probably a real historical figure, but that still means that what we know is passed down through many tellings and retellings. The stories will have to speak for themselves.
One story we can begin with is supposedly about him as a young boy in the equivalent of Buddhist Sunday School, where he was being taught about the Heart Sutra, and the little whippersnapper raises his hand and says, The Heart Sutra says there’s no eye, ears, nose, tongue, body, mind. But Teacher! I’ve got eyes! I’ve got a nose! I’ve got a tongue! Basically the teacher says, If you’re going to ask questions like that, we’re going to send you to a monastery.
His question is, in a sense, not trivial. People still try to figure out what it means to say, No eye, no ear, and to this day, I’m still invited to conferences where people ask, What does no self mean? Obviously there’s a self. Why does Buddhism say there’s no self? It’s not so different from asking what does it mean to say no eye, no ear, and the meaning of that word “no” is actually not so simple for us to try to explain. But we have to, whether we’re talking about an eye or a table or the self, recognize that “no” means no unchanging, fixed, essential nature. It’s not that we’re saying that there are no things, or, rather, we’re saying “thing” doesn’t mean what we usually take it to mean.
We have to find ways to talk about process and change and interconnection and context, and that there is no “thing” that exists essentially or separately from that. It’s impervious to time and independent of its relations. Even when we explain that, it can be a hard idea to wrap your mind around and to follow through all the implications. So after that, the precocious boy – doesn’t he go to a monastery, and the next we hear of him, he is preoccupied with the question of whether non-sentient beings preach the dharma, or whether non-sentient beings have buddha-nature.
Again, this can seem to be a tad abstract or esoteric question for any young person to be preoccupied with, and so we want to try to find the context here that would make that an alive question for somebody. Before I go into that, let me read a little bit of the story that’s told about him and that question and where he went with it, and then I’ll try to explain what I think the significance of the whole thing is.
“Dongshan first inquired about this question with the great teacher Guishan Lingyou” and he goes to Guishan and tells him a long story about a previous student and teacher, where Nan’yo Echu, the teacher, maintained that non-sentient beings did indeed expound the dharma constantly, radiantly, and unceasingly. In the story, the teacher states that all the sages can hear this non-sentient dharma. But then, perhaps ironically, he adds that fortunately he himself could not hear the non-sentient beings expounding, because otherwise human students could not hear his teaching. And he goes on to cite an old sutra, the Flower Ornament Sutra, that says “all living beings expound it, throughout the three times, everything expounds it.”
So after accounting this whole scriptural story, Dongshan asks Guishan to come and talk about the story, and explain it to him, and Guishan raises his fly whisk. Dongshan had no understanding of what that meant and asked for further explanation. Guishan said, It can never be explained to you by means of one born of mother and father. This he found not helpful, and Guishan sent him to go study with Yunyan to see if he could help him, Yunyan being another dharma brother.
So he goes to the second teacher, recounts the whole story, and again asks: Who is able to hear the dharma expounded by nonsentient beings? And Yunyan says he can’t hear it. But if he could, Dongshan would not be able to hear him. Essentially he’s saying the same thing back to him. Dongshan then asks why he could not hear it himself? Guess what? Yunyan raised his fly whisk, the same gesture, the same answer. We often get this. Go to the second teacher and get the same answer.
And Yunyan said, You can’t even hear when I expound the dharma. How do you expect to hear it when a nonsentient being expounds the dharma? Well, that seemed to get through at least a little bit, although we don’t hear that it produced a great enlightenment experience. It did result, however, in a little poem that he wrote about it. Dongshan expressed his understanding:
How marvelous! How marvelous!
The Dharma expounded by sentient beings is inconceivable.
Listening with your ears, no sound.
Hearing with your eyes, you directly understand.
What strikes me about the poem is that it goes back to Dongshan’s childhood question about no eyes and no ears. It seems all of a sudden he might have finally gotten what “no eyes” means, what “no ears” means. Hearing with your eyes you directly understand. What we’ve got here is a breakdown of separate identities, that it’s not just the eye that sees, it’s the whole body that sees. The ears that see, the person, it’s the whole world that is enabling seeing to happen, and none of it is separate from anything else. Part of what’s happening in this whole discussion of sentient and nonsentient beings is we’re faced with a dichotomy, a dualism between sentient and non-sentient, that somehow is being challenged. Maybe that’s a false distinction, maybe there’s just the world.
But I think we can say a little more about what makes the question relevant. It has to do, I think, with a changing idea of what is meant by buddha nature. I think there is in one sense a buddha nature which is predominantly the Indian version that speaks of buddha nature as the potential for realization, the potential to become buddha. We each have within ourselves buddha nature and we are capable of realization, of enlightenment. That use of buddha nature starts to rub up against a different use of it, where buddha nature is meant as the reality of impermanence and interdependence. When we say all things have buddha nature, what we’re saying is that all things share the same fundamental reality, impermanence and interdependence.
Part of the reason we call it buddha nature is that there’s also this third element of perfection. This is what you could say Shakyamuni realizes looking up at the morning star, that the twinkling star is ever changing, the star is not separate from him or separate from the whole world, and in some way he realizes the fullness and completeness, the perfection of everything just as it is. I and everything else in this moment attain buddhahood.
This is not, I think, some quasi-mystical notion, some panpsychism, some kind of consciousness located in inanimate objects and in things, that somehow an obscure consciousness is going to awaken. It’s rather that everything as it is partakes of impermanence, interdependence, and as such, is just what it is, is perfect just as it is. What we have here, then, is a shift from an emphasis on potential, the potential for realization, for buddha nature and the capacity for awakening, to buddha nature as an expression of the way things already are. And I think those two things are getting either confused or in conflict with each other, or people aren’t quite sure how to balance them out or integrate them. And so, when we talk about nonsentient beings expounding the dharma, it doesn’t make much sense to think of nonsentient beings having buddha nature in the sense of becoming enlightened, but it makes a lot of sense to say that nonsentient beings, or the inanimate world, is constantly manifesting the reality of impermanence and interdependence and perfection, that in this sense, life is constantly teaching you the dharma, that this basic reality is not esoteric or hidden. It’s being constantly shown moment after moment in the way everything naturally is.
Now I’m going to make a stretch here, and say that this difference between the two uses of buddha nature could be imagined to correspond roughly to a Rinzai and Soto practice, and perhaps what we’re seeing in this first story of Dongshan, is the kind of re-emphasis on seeing the way things already are rather than an emphasis on: How do I become enlightened? How do I realize the potential to become buddha? How does my practice already manifest this reality if It’s not going to be a means to an end to get me from here to there?
When the monk asks Joshu, Does a dog have buddha nature? It feels like there’s this big gap between dog and buddha nature, between me and buddha nature. How am I ever going to achieve that? How do I close that gap? That seems to be all about realization. Yet here with non-sentient beings expounding the dharma, we’re saying, Can I see what’s already right in front of me? Can I realize that I am an expression of that reality just like the rocks and trees? And so I think we can get a little taste here of what’s going to be coming in Dogen, with the identify of practice and realization, and our sitting itself is an expression most fundamentally of who and what we are, and our buddha nature is already fully manifesting itself in this moment and in this act of sitting.