“Walking in the mist, suddenly your coat is soaked through.” ~Dogen
“Walking in the mist” refers to the steady process of daily sitting, reflection, and application. “Suddenly your coat is soaked through,” is kenshō. And it’s an important thing to check with “someone who knows real practice.”
Shifting metaphor, gradual cultivation is like turning the lid on a Mason jar. Who knows where we’re at in the process? Then suddenly it pops off.
In the Shōbōgenzō, “Self-Realization Samadhi (Jishō Zammai),” however, Dōgen also insists on the importance on an abrupt nondual kenshō. He challenges Dàhuì for not having had a sufficiently unitary kenshō experience.
The Tanahashi translation has a key passage of Dōgen’s criticism like this:
“Although [Dàhuì] often tried to open up for one phrase of enlightenment, he was lacking a single experience. He could not take hold of or drop away from this single experience” .
While Nishijima and Cross have it like this:
“[Dàhuì] ultimately kept missing that one experience, and there is no way of compensating for that, for one cannot omit that experience. He did not grasp that to study and train is to awaken to one’s True Self. He did not hear that to delve deeply into the writings of myriad generations is to come to realize what that Self truly is.
Dogen, however, also cautions against extensive study and wide-reading:
Nothing can be gained by extensive study and wide reading. Give them up immediately. Just focus your mind on one thing, absorb the old examples, study the actions of former Zen Masters, and penetrate deeply into a single form of practice.
Submitted February 20, 2018 at 07:05PM by planetbyter http://ift.tt/2C7CRXR
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