Hello Humans,
In our last section, we encountered Master Dogen's view of this life and world as like a boat sailing: It takes sailors (us) to sail the boat, just making the boat a boat (and not just nailed together wood or, even more basically, some carbon atoms of a certain configuration that we think of as "wood"). Likewise, the water and shore make boat and us. This week we see that our view and values turn atoms of H2O into "the sea" and grains of sand into "shore," so give them reality and life. The whole universe is interdependent cycles of round and round like this. You might think that sea and shore would exist (and existed for millions and millions of years) without "us" ... and in one sense they did in a basic physical and chemical way we can presume ... but truly "sea" and "shore" did not exist before our human perception any more than a group of carbon atoms became a "sailboat" without a sea and sailor!
(Some quantum mechanical models posit that even the atoms don't exist quite as they are until perceived ... but I don't want to go there now. I am happy to stay at the macro level.)
We tend to see the world as just being "there," and it is "there" as "the world" even without us. We are then born, then assume that we experience rather accurately through our eyes and other senses this world as it really is "out there." However, now you might see how our thoughts, judgments and imperfect mental modeling create so much of what we assume is "out there."
And those features are myriad ... water for you is home for fish (who doubtlessly encounters water very differently than we do ... perhaps not even noticing it any more than we notice the air we breathe ... likely without even a name or complex thought about it). Water is a lifesaver for humans when thirsty (unless sea water, of course) but a lifetaker to a drowning man.
Your assignment for this lesson is to take an ordinary activity ... drinking tea, walking on the ground, brushing the teeth ... and describe it in a short paragraph as a cycle of giving and taking, name and ideas assigned, one way to humans and another way to non-humans ... much as Dogen does with his boat and sea and sailor.
Here are some creatures that call "home sweet home" some environments we would call death and hell.
Gassho, J
STLah
