An edited transcript of a Dharma talk given to the Priory congregation in January 2023.

What I wanted to start with for this talk was the line from the Sandōkai that gets brought up many times, the one where it says, “If, from your experience of the senses, basic truth you do not know, how can you ever find the path that certain is, no matter how far distant you may walk?”¹ I want to emphasise and draw out a slightly different point from the one that’s usually made about this teaching.

What that line is saying is: “You can know the basic truth from your experience. And from that, you can find the path that is certain – a path of certainty.” But the part I want to emphasise this morning is that it is your experience. The implication is that there is a ‘you’ that’s experiencing things. In other words, as I’ve said before – and want to come back to today – we are all aware that we experience being a ‘me’. And it depends on how you want to describe things from your point of view, but one way of describing this is, and I’ll do it from my point of view, that the ‘me’, the ‘I’, is somewhere ‘in here’ as one monk put it; I’m here somewhere – back behind my eyes, in this head here, it would seem, and this is in my body. And that’s a very common experience that we all have. Each one of you might give slightly different words for that, but it’s undeniable that we experience things that way. I’m not saying that’s the only way we experience things, but that’s certainly one way we experience being a ‘me’. And part of that experiencing is, going back to my formulaic way of describing it, that there is the ‘me’, the ‘I’, that experiences feelings, experiences, emotions, and thoughts or mental activity.

And here’s the other thing to add in there and make it more explicit; it is that the ‘I’, the ‘me’, is looking out upon the world around me – looking out upon all of you on the screen joined in via Zoom; looking at all of you here in person.  That’s ‘my’ experience.

Great Master Dōgen, through Shōhaku Okumura, talks about this as ‘a persistent sense of individuality’ – a persistent sense of being a ‘me’ (that’s another way of saying individuality). And that means the ‘me’, or the ‘I’, the persistent sense of ‘me’, stays the same. I’ll read a passage from the book Realising Genjōkōan; this is how Great Master Dōgen talks about this persistent sense of being a ‘me’, or being an individual. And remember that when Dōgen travelled to China, the usual mode of transportation in those days was by boat – and we’re talking very small boats, by the way – where you would be up on deck a good part of the time. And oftentimes, what you would do in those days was try to go across the more open sea areas as quickly as possible, and then skirt around the shoreline, so you were never out of sight of the shore for safety reasons. So this is Dōgen:

If one riding in a boat watches the coast, one mistakenly perceives the coast as moving.²

He already said before this, “If one riding in a boat watches the coast, one perceives the coast as moving.” And then he’s already showing you the direction he’s going in; he’s saying you mistakenly perceive the coast is moving.  He then says,

If one watches the boat [in relation to the surface of the water], then one notices that the boat is moving. I think our most common experience of this is when we’re driving somewhere, and most of the time it feels like we’re just sitting in this car, and the scenery appears to be moving.

Then Dōgen says:

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.

What he just said there is when we just carry on behaving as a normal person, we mistakenly think that the self-nature of the mind is permanent. We mistakenly think that the self – this perception of being a ‘me’ or an ‘I’ – is permanent and correct.  And then he finishes off by saying,

When we intimately practise and return right here, it is clear that all things have no [fixed] self.

‘Intimately practice’ is to do meditation, live a contemplative life, and follow the Precepts. And when we intimately practice – when we are meditating and are simply present with what is, right here, right now – we come to realize that, as Dōgen says, “all things have no fixed self”. Though, the emphasis I’m wanting to place is that we realise the ‘me’, the ‘I’ isn’t a fixed self. Because I think what’s really important with that way of phrasing it is that the word ‘self’ is still being used.

Dōgen has always been very clear in saying that as long as you’re alive and kicking, you’re going to have this sense of being an individual. You’re always going to have this sense of being a ‘me’ or an ‘I’. But the really crucial thing that Dōgen says is that, through our practice, we realize it’s not a fixed ‘me’. In other words, it’s not a permanent, unchanging ‘me’.

Shōhaku Okumura continues by saying:

Here, Dōgen uses the analogy of a person’s perception of movement while riding in a boat with the shore in sight. To this person it may look as if the shore is moving, when in fact it is the boat that moves. In the same way it usually seems that things around us are changing and moving while we stay the same.  And we try to find the underlying principle of this change so that we can control things.

Now, this whole area about trying to find underlying principles of this change, and controlling things, is something he goes on to talk about in quite a bit of detail. That’s not the direction I want to go in this morning. It’s a really important area to go into, so we will probably do that at some point. But notice here what’s really intriguing is that he says, “In the same way [as the description of the boat and the shore] it usually seems that things around us are changing and moving while we stay the same.” It looks like things are changing around us, but we’re staying the same. And that’s actually an incorrect perception. But then we take that incorrect perception, and we try to find the underlying principle of that change. So, we’re adding incorrectness to incorrectness, as it were. We’re trying to look at the underlying principle of this change, which is actually a misperception, and then we’re trying to control things. There’s a misperception, add another misperception, and then, based on those two misperceptions, we try to control things. We try to make our life work the way we want it to. This is a much more modern way of saying what the Buddha talked about from the very beginning with the first Noble Truth, i.e. suffering exists.  Suffering exists, or we perpetuate suffering because it’s all built on: “I think the shore is moving”, when in fact it isn’t – at least in this analogy. There may be things moving on the shore like people and stuff, but we won’t have that level of complexity in this discussion yet.

A bit further on in Okumura’s commentary, he says: “Yet when we intimately practice and return to right here, we see that we are impermanent, lack independent existence, and are connected to all things.”

Now, what’s interesting is that the understanding and experience of this comes in those three steps. And the really big thing that needs to come to us at some point, in small or bigger ways, is the fact that we see that we (or, putting it in the first person), ‘I’ start seeing that the ‘I’ or ‘me’ is impermanent. In other words, it’s always changing. And coming to that understanding that it is changing, plus the deeper seeing into what’s actually going on there, leads us to realise that we don’t have any independent existence. So we’re already moving away from the sense of being a persisting individual.

But then as we continue to practice we realise that lacking independent existence means that there’s something more than just a sense of individuality. And the way it’s expressed here is saying that we are connected to all things. The phrase that Dōgen used, “When we intimately practice and return right here…”, that phrase “right here”, that’s the reality of interdependent origination. Again, that’s a phrase that references another really important teaching in Buddhism.  And Okumura says,

Interdependent origination is the reality in which everything including human beings exists within the vast network of causes and conditions. When we become one with this reality, we see that we share the same life with all things and we learn to relate to the earth and all living beings with care and compassion. Meditation is a practice in which we become intimate with this reality.

I think that we all start by realising that we’re conscious, that we have awareness, and that consciousness or awareness seems to be ‘in here’: “This is my body; this is my mind”, and all of the things that go with that. So just to clarify the line from the Sandōkai again: Oftentimes the direction it gets talked about has to do with the experience of the senses and the sense objects. What I’m really wanting to do is focus on the experience of being a ‘me’; don’t worry about the other stuff right now.

What I find really interesting is that I can remember when I first started at the Priory, back in my mid-20s, and certainly as a young monk, which was a few years later, I found one of the core teachings in Buddhism, that of ‘annica’ – the law of change, impermanence – everything is always changing. I thought, “Of course that makes perfect sense. The teachings in Buddhism are about all the ramifications of change and impermanence – I agree with that completely.”

Then you come back to your day-to-day life and experience, and there’s this entrenched, persistent sense of being ‘me’. That’s the way it always was, up into my 20s and beyond, and that’s what I was used to. I just carried on with that – even though the teachings in Buddhism are obviously pointing to something more than that.  But you wake up in the morning and there’s a ‘me’ again. You carry on from there.

I know it was the case with me when I woke up this morning, “Oh, there you are, again”. And I’m pretty sure that was the case for most of you too, and I want to say that’s actually not a problem. It’s fine that’s there. Again, recall Dōgen saying that you’re always going to have this sense of individuality.

But keep doing your meditation.  Keep doing your practice. Keep following the Precepts. Just keep doing that. Have your ‘me’ do that. Have your ‘I’, your ‘self’ do that, and if at times you realise that you’ve created karma, that you’ve caused harm, or hurt both to yourself or others – as very often happens – carry on with your practice, and do what seems best to do, making amends for that, fixing things and seeing more deeply into the patterns that led to that. And do your best to grow and change and try not to do that as much. And maybe what I’m going to say next is a result of having been kicking around in this world for over 60 years now. Maybe it doesn’t occur in earlier times in one’s life, but what I’d like to throw into that mix about doing your meditation, doing your practice, is allowing time to unfold. In other words, let things just take their natural course, the natural order of just the unfolding of whatever is happening. And I think part of the implication of those things, or what we can pull out of that, is that it’s not going to happen overnight. So allow time to unfold.

There’s an interesting thing about Great Master Dōgen’s journey from Japan to China. He was 23 years old at the time, and he returned to Japan at the age of 27. Now possibly he could have been like Reverend Master Daizui, in that even as a very, very young person, he was already mature in many respects. Part of me wants to say he was actually a really young guy when he went to China, and he probably had a fairly youthful body and mind at that time, even if it was maybe more mature. And that factor of age and maturity is important to look at because that affects our experience of the senses, for each and every one of us.

Now, since I am the ‘me’ that I am, I can give you a sense of how I’m looking at things. And at the age of 40, I’d been in the monastery for over a decade by then, but I felt like I was still in the same body and mind I was in when I was a late teenager and in my early 20s.  It seemed like I still had the same body and mind. Something happened after that though.

When I say the same body, what I mean is that I still had that same kind of recognisable level of energy; the same level of strength, flexibility, coordination. In other words, physically I was still functioning the way I had since my early 20s. And leading up to that point for 40-odd years, it was consistent, it was dependable.

I’m referring to both the body and my mind. And what’s interesting is that because it was both consistent and dependable, unbeknownst to me I just took it as a refuge. I thought how things are when you’re in your early 20s, well, that’s the way life is going to be – this is the way life is. I’m putting it in those terms because now, more than 20 years on, there are times when I don’t even recognise this body! Dōgen uses a phrase in Shushōgi where he says, “At this moment, this body is not my own…”³ Sometimes I’m almost incredulous, saying, “This isn’t my body!”

And of course, this is all based on memory, but what I’m implying here is the change that’s happened has been radical enough, severe enough, intense enough, for me to realise it’s actually not dependable – not in the way that I was thinking it was. It’s not a refuge in the way I had hoped or thought it would be. The thing that’s dawned on me most vividly in the last year or so is that, no matter what I had got up to during the day, there always used to be that refuge of sleeping at night. You recharge the batteries, everything goes blank – like turning a computer off. And there’s a fresh start in the morning.

With this I’m mostly talking about body, but it applies equally to the mind. There are some aspects of my mind that still have abilities, certain areas that I’m good at, that I’ve learned and so on. But now I really perceive the energy it takes to get that going, to dust off the cobwebs and so on.

So again, this is the experience of the senses. Within the sense of being a ‘me’ or an ‘I’ there’s the experiencing of body and mind taking this trajectory, changing in these ways.  And of course, it’s just very natural and very normal that when we are younger, because the body and mind seem to be a certain way and persist in being a certain way for some time, we rely on them, and take refuge in them. We kind of make assumptions about it and so on.  And this isn’t exclusively when we’re young. I bet some of us even in our older years still do that too – take refuge in, or make assumptions about, how the body is now, or how the mind is now, and we rely on those assumptions, thinking, “That’s the way it is.”

We have the phrases, ‘shot across the bow’ and ‘wake up call’. That applies here, in that what I’ve been describing is this unfolding of things, and there can be times when the change can be so dramatic or radical, that it shifts our experience, and with that it shifts our understanding of what’s really going on more deeply. It becomes very clear that actually our bodies and our minds are the way they are right now, but really that’s all we can say – we can’t make any reliable statement about tomorrow or the future. The shift can happen enough that we realise that we aren’t our bodies. We aren’t our minds. What is there, then? And what I would like to do is bring up an analogy, try to verbally describe an image that you may find helpful as a way of picturing what’s going on.

I had grandparents that lived over in Central Oregon, and so would oftentimes be over there visiting them. And as many of you know, Central Oregon is really hot in summer. And one of the interesting phenomena that occur which utterly delighted me as a young person, possibly as a budding science-interested type was that, out in the open dusty fields when it gets really hot, you get these really cool little dust devils that arise which spin around and move along. These are little whirlwinds, swirls of dust and plant debris. I remember occasionally seeing little bits and pieces of tumbleweeds in them, and maybe there was stubble from a farm field or something that would get all mixed up in it. They were about human-sized, at least the ones I remember – maybe ten feet tall at the most – they weren’t monsters. I even went running after one once and, if it was a clear, open dusty field, I remember noticing it would persist for quite a while. It would just be swirling around and kind of walking across different fields and so on. I think eventually I got to a point where I ran into a fence and couldn’t follow it beyond that. There was something that persisted but it wasn’t there in the morning. It had to get really hot at some point, and I could watch this kind of little initial swirling going on and eventually it built and started to move across the field.

I feel that our own personal experience, and our description of being a body and mind, is actually somewhat similar to one of these little dust devils. How so? Oh, I don’t know about you but there have been times when I’m sitting down and meditating and the mind is swirling like crazy and things come in, swirl around, and they don’t seem to go away too easily, at least that was true in the past. You could think of us as being an aware, or conscious, little dust devil. Things literally swirl into our awareness: physical sensations, feelings, thoughts and mental activities. Our bodies are very similar to the lifespan of a dust devil. We start out pretty small. I don’t know about all of you, but I wasn’t the one that caused myself to come into existence. I wasn’t the one who made myself get born. It sort of happened – just like a little dust devil happens. There are certain causes and conditions that occur – it starts off really tiny, and depending on the conditions it grows. And what happens to us physically during our life cycle is similar to dust devils, which eventually migrate; conditions become such that the dust is pulled up from the ground or vacuumed up, goes up to the top and sort of spits out the top, and eventually it all just falls apart into a shower of dust on the ground again.

I’ve described this in the past using different analogies, but the thing about a little dust devil is that it’s swirling around, it’s a sort of a circle, a loop. It loops back on itself and in doing so it creates an appearance of this entity that we give words to and say, “Oh, there’s that little dust devil, there’s that little dust swirl.” But the fact that we swirl back on ourselves, loop back on ourselves; we’re a kind of tightly-looped contained being of awareness and consciousness, that gives us a sense of being a ‘me’ or an ‘I’. And yet what can be problematic is that for most of us there’s this sort of persisting sense of the body being a certain way for several decades, and our minds being a certain way for quite some time too. We take the stuff that’s swirling around to be ‘me’.

And yet, the real beauty is that as we get older, as we allow time to unfold, the dust devil, the swirling dust, matures in its lifecycle such that it starts dissipating again. And we start recognising that the reason the body and the mind are the way they are, has to do with other causes and conditions. The reason the dust devil comes into being is because there’s dust available, and it’s hot – there are lots of factors. And when those conditions are there, this additional thing arises within it. But you can equally say that because there are dust devils, there’s a dusty field, and there’s a certain temperature range, etc. The dust devil actually can be looked at from the other perspective: it’s an expression of the temperature and the conditions of the dust and the field. You don’t have one without the other.

What I’m leading to is that there’s actually not any separateness between the dust devil and the hot temperature and the dust and all these other things. They’re all one.

If you find this analogy helpful, you can go about your day being this kind of conscious, aware little dust devil. Causes and conditions change throughout our day, and so various thoughts will come swirling into our heads, various physical sensations and emotions will come swirling in. But the really key question that seems to occur within that, and the key opportunity and choice we have is, are we going to latch on to those feelings, emotions, thoughts as defining who we are? Are we going to try and hold on to that stuff that’s swirling around right now? That would be, as Shohaku Okumura said, trying to control things.

Somewhere within all of this swirl of our daily life, of our daily practice of meditation, and keeping the Precepts, there’s a realization that the current feelings, emotions and thoughts are there because of causes and conditions that we’re actually not in charge or in control of. Our growing clarification of this situation, our growing wisdom with all of this leads us to thinking, “Oh wait a minute, if I want this to persist, and take the steps to get it to persist, I’m setting myself up for suffering.” And what we’re also doing is setting ourselves up for experiencing separateness. We’re setting ourselves up for not being present with the compassion and care that’s inherently there within the universe. So we can start taking refuge in meditation, the practice, the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Taking refuge in it is coming back to, “Oh, at the moment, I’m this certain little type of dust devil with these various things swirling around. Oh, isn’t that interesting? But oh look, that swirling around isn’t separate from the causes and conditions that got it going. And oh, look, those causes and conditions are there because of other causes and conditions.” And eventually, we start understanding interdependent origination. We start experiencing directly that unity, that oneness with all things.

We think, “At the moment, I’m a certain little dust devil. That’s fine because it is one with all things, it’s not lacking for anything whatsoever, even though at the moment the experience is that of pain, isolation, ‘It shouldn’t be this way. I don’t want it this way’, etc.” Don’t worry, it won’t be that way forever – usually much less than forever actually.

Now I don’t want to talk much more about where this awareness, this practice keeps leading to, as wonderful and beautiful as it is, because that experience, that understanding will very naturally arise and unfold. Just keep coming back to your daily meditation, your daily practice; keep coming back to the awareness of body and mind, keep coming back to just softening and opening to the causes and conditions that are there. And just by continuing to do that, that’s the key, the door, it’s the opening to all of this.

That’s why Great Master Dōgen talks about this human life that we have as actually the intersection of individuality and what he calls ‘universality’, the interdependent origination, the oneness of all things. If we personify a dust devil, which is a little tricky, the mistake that could be made as a little dust devil is that we think that we made ourselves the dust devil, that we made ourselves who we are, and therefore we’re the ones that need to continue making ourselves who we are. It’s much easier than that.  We just give ourselves to the causes and conditions, just allow them to keep unfolding. The universe knows what to do with you. Just let it keep doing that and let it keep unfolding you.  To me this is yet again another way of describing how our Sōtō Zen practice is fundamentally based in complete trust of the life we’re in, and the allowing of it to just keep on unfolding.

Notes

1. The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives for the Laity. Shasta Abbey Press, 1990.
2. Okumura, Shohaku, Realising Genjōkōan. Wisdom Publications, 2010, pp 98-99.
3. Great Master Dōgen, Shushōgi, in Jiyu-Kennett, P.T.N.H, Zen is Eternal Life, 4th ed. (Shasta Abbey Press: 1999.)