Realizing Genjokoan - Chapter 5 - Last Portion
Dear Genjoers,
Well, as Ango and Jukai season has come to rest this year, a good time to return to Rev. Okumura's Realizing Genjo Koan. We pick up with the final pages of Chapter 5, bottom of page 66 to the end. It is a good place to resume.
I feel that, in these pages, Rev. Okumura is pointing to our transcendence of the self/other divide in a couple of more very nice ways, helping us experience that interflowing of our small "self" and all of the wide world. So, he points to how we usually experience sensations such as, for example, how we drink a glass of milk (he does not mention this particular example in the book, but others like it). Our language conveys the usual divided way we see the experience such as:
I (my subject) drink (something I experience doing) milk (separate object) which came from a cow (another separate thing), fed on grass (more separate thing) nurtured by the sun (even more separate thing).
Yes, we realize that the milk will become our body ("we are what we eat"), and in that sense so does the cow, grass and sun that are contained in the milk.
However, we can also "rewrite" the sentence in a more Zenny way perhaps to convey something of the experience when all gets blended together, and subject and object merge, perhaps:
I drink milk which came from a cow, fed on grass nurtured by the sun.
becomes a single verb which is:
... drinkingmilkcowgrasssunIsungrasscowmilkdrinkinging cowsunIgrassdrinkingmilk ....
Reminds me of German somehow. Or scrambling the whole above even further ...
... irssgkoainnasisuarnkunckcdsindiIgIiriwlgngdnsnkusn mmkrwckmigrroglinoswilgs ...
which maybe is just this drinking right here in every swallow ...
Something like that.
In any case, one can experience or, at least, know deep in the bones that "I drink milk" is actually this immediate sweet taste of cows and field, sun and moon, all the world and the farthest star too, including all the past and future.
You see a glass of milk on a table, and your hand reaches out to grab it ... but the whole "loop" of "sun, grass, cow, milk, glass, table, light photons, eye, brain, thirst, desire, hand, reaching, tongue, tasting" is actually one single phenomenon ... one loop that embodies and includes the whole world as part of the process, even a moth fluttering in Tunisia 1000 years ago and a grain of dust on a planet several light years away. That loop is actually your greater "you" as much as your own nose or your own backside (but before it goes to your head, your "you" is actually just swept up in the process too, a link in the chain).
That is one heck of a glass of milk!
I think that the last phrase in today's readings, "when one side is illumined, the other side is dark" is something like when we see the wholeness the separation is hidden, when we see the separation the wholeness is hidden ... but actually we can know both as true at once. In my own book (The Zen Master's Dance), to be published this year, I said the following, rewriting this Genjo passage a drop for readability ...
Quote:
When one sees the forms or hears the sounds of the world fully and wholly with body and mind [free of judgment, free of mental categories, transcending “me, my, mine”], one intimately understands without separation. Then, it is not like some object and its reflection in a mirror, and it is unlike the moon and its reflection in distant water, whereby one side is illuminated and the other side is left in the dark.
Most of us feel cut off from life much of the time, as if our self and the rest of the world were separate. Frictions and disappointments come out of this sense of separation. But there is a way to experience life so unified, so intimate, that such frictions and disappointments drop away. It takes a sense of separation to have tumult and trouble. So, let’s just stop feeling that separation! Give up sticking so stubbornly to this sense of our separate selves via our Buddhist practice. Then, one sees both sides at once, wholeness and separation, completion and lack, as two sides of a single no-sided coin, and all is illuminated.
Gassho, J (who is mildly lactose intolerant actually! :p )
STLah
